Project to Pour Water Into Volcano to Make Power
By JEFF BARNARD Associated Press
January 14, 2012 (AP)
Basic Quick Summary
Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano in Central Oregon this summer to demonstrate new technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector that has yet to live up to its promise.
They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn't dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes — without shaking the earth and rattling the nerves of nearby residents.
...Efforts to use the earth's heat to generate power, known as geothermal energy, have been further hampered by technical problems and worries that tapping it can cause earthquakes.
...They are helping AltaRock Energy, Inc. of Seattle and Davenport Newberry Holdings LLC of Stamford, Conn., demonstrate whether the next level in geothermal power development can work on the flanks of Newberrry Volcano, located about 20 miles south of Bend, Ore.
...To tap that heat — and grow geothermal energy from a tiny niche into an important source of green energy — engineers are working on a new technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems.
"To build geothermal in a big way beyond where it is now requires new technology, and that is where EGS comes in," said Steve Hickman, a research geophysicist with the U.S.
...A new international protocol is coming out at the end of this month that urges EGS developers to keep projects out of urban areas, the so-called "sanity test," said Ernie Majer, a seismologist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
...Newberry will show if it works in a brand new EGS field, and in a different kind of geology, volcanic rock, said Colin Williams, a USGS geophysicist also in Menlo Park.
...But the Department of Energy will be keeping a close eye on the project, and any significant quakes would shut it down at least temporarily, he said.
...Natural geothermal resources account for about 0.3 percent of U.S. electricity production, but a 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology report projected EGS could bump that to 10 percent within 50 years, at prices competitive with fossil-fuels.
...A 2008 USGS assessment found EGS throughout the West, where hot rocks are closer to the surface than in the East, has the potential to produce half the country's electricity.
"The important question we need to answer now," said Williams, the USGS geophysicist who compiled the assessment, "is how geothermal fits into the renewable energy picture, and how EGS fits.
Very short summary of 260 comments from SlashDot, the Geeks who "put the sheik in Tin Foil hats"
What could go wrong?
...I personally think AGW is a load of crap, but I do recognize that some people would feel it important enough to bring the government down on this practice.
The other problem is that wouldn't want everything that goes into a landfill being burned and put into the atmosphere, quite a lot would be toxic. I think that if you started separating what's OK from what's bad, you'd end up with a pile of landfill waste, a pile of recyclable items, and a very small if not nonexistent pile of volcano fuel.
...I suspect BP and Exxon both had a much harder time getting new contracts, but in the end, there are few companies that can do these kinds of jobs.
...And no one's gone to the trouble of modeling what happens when you chill down part of a lava dome. ... Do you get a nice fissure opening up somewhere else to flow the lava into new and vulnerable areas?
...Are you making the question in the rhetorical sense because you know for a fact that no one is doing just that, or are you asking the question because that is what you are assuming?
...Before the first (Trinity) test, Enrico Fermi began offering anyone listening a wager on "whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world."
...We mock anti-nuclear power alarmists for blowing fears out of proportion, yet here we are saying "Oh no we shouldn't do this because there might be a catastrophe"
...I didn't RTFA, but with our projected water shortages coming in the future do we really want to be pumping millions of gallons for energy?
...But people like to live in desert climates like Phoenix and Las Vegas where they don't have to worry about rainy days messing up the golf they play on irrigated fairways.
...If there is an area that has a shot at 100% of their electricity from non-petroleum sources, it's the Big Island, with abundant wind, solar and geothermal options.
...In the short-term, though, I'm more worried about the Sun undergoing its projected expansion phase (in a few billion years), or human beings accidentally finding a way to stop the Earth's dynamo (that one actually keeps me up at night).
...The results of that review have not yet been announced, but the type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers requires fracturing the bedrock then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam.
...I live near The Geysers, where "treated" sewage water is pumped into the ground in order to keep geothermal production up at the power plant, which is perpetually over budget and under production, and which has produced a superfund site where they formerly buried the spray-off from the turbine wheels in drums. The turbines are produced by Halliburton — I've seen the red Halliburton truck dragging one up Bottle Rock Rd. on a massive flatbed.
...The turbines are produced by Halliburton — I've seen the red Halliburton truck dragging one up Bottle Rock Rd. on a massive flatbed.
...If indeed you have seen Halliburton at the geysers, they must have been a transportation contractor or something like that.
...I'll agree it is a very old report and standards have changed since then, but the only other EPA document available is in 1995- they seem to have capped some wells that had the potential of a hydrogen sulfide explosion.
...Here in Norway, we have a lot of "clean" hydropower, but that has always faced opposition from environmentalists worrying about salmon and other fish, and from the native Sami people in the north.
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