Renewell

Abandoned and inactive oil wells represent a massive environmental liability, often leaking methane and requiring expensive cleanup. At the same time, the transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar requires massive amounts of flexible energy storage to manage intermittency.

Renewell Energy developed a patented “Gravity Well” technology that repurposes inactive oil wells as mechanical batteries. By suspending a heavy weight in the wellbore, energy can be stored by lifting the weight during periods of excess supply and released by lowering it to turn a regenerative winch. PCDworks hosted the Renewell team at their HardTech Basecamp, providing the engineering depth, specialized testing labs, and 1:1 mentorship needed to build and de-risk the first full-scale prototype, Artemis Prime.

The collaboration successfully produced Artemis Prime, which was built and tested on the PCDworks campus before field deployment. The project successfully converted an environmental liability into a revenue-generating asset, with the potential to scale across millions of inactive wells in the U.S. to provide gigawatt-hours of energy storage. The project has since received backing from the DOE (ARPA-E) and NREL.