While Jim Hansen lobbies states to get newly designed clean burning coal fired generation plants not built, California remains lukewarm still on an opportunity to extract geothermal heat for a variety of locations in California. Nevada on the other hand, is moving forward fast, expecting to quadruple their energy output from geothermal.
Last year while I was surveying Lovelock, NV USHCN station, I happened upon a geothermal plant along Interstate-80. You can see it here on Google Earth. While it doesn’t look like much from the air, you can see the main building and the array of pipes to the wells. i’d been meaning to blog about it, and today was the day.
There is quite a bit of area in the USA that can be exploited for geothermal energy. Most of it in the west.
Click for a larger image
Low and moderate temperature geothermal resources are widely distributed throughout the western and central U.S. and can be seen in Figure 1. There are also a few low-temperature geothermal resources that occur in the east.
There has been several major efforts in assessing the potential for low-temperature geothermal resources in the U.S. The first major effort in the 1980’s included 17 states which resulted in geothermal resource maps, prepared by the National Geophysical Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that are still being used today. The latest effort, which included 10 of the 17 original states, was in the early 1990’s, and which resulted mainly in individual digital databases of all known geothermal wells and springs for a total of over 9,000 wells and springs. The 10 states were: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington (Lienau and Ross, 1996).
The low-temperature resource assessment completed in 1990’s included another task. The task was to complete a statewide study of collocated geothermal resources with the only criteria being a collocated community with a resource temperature above 50° C (122°F) and located within 8 km (5 miles) of a community (many of which have <1,000 population). There were 1,723 wells and springs identified with a temperature over 50° C (122°F) with 1,469 of them located within 8 km (5 miles) of a community. There were a total of 271 communities identified within the 10 western states.
The oldest, most versatile and most common use of geothermal energy is direct-use applications; although, most people associate geothermal with power generation. Directuse applications include: greenhouse heating, aquaculture pond and raceway heating, space and district heating, industrial applications such as food processing, and resorts and spas. The fastest growing direct-use applications are for greenhouses and aquaculture, which can be seen in Figure 2.
The reports of the original survey teams and the new information from the additional six states documents a total of 11,775 wells and springs in the databases with the new states producing 2,731 more entries. The number of collocated sites increased to 404 from the previous 271 for the 10 states. The total of wells and springs with a temperature over 50° C (122°F) went from 1723 to 2211, which is an increase of 28%.
There’s a lot of heat out there, I hope it gets more exploration and application. Since California imports a good deal of it’s electric power, and since demand remains high and is expected to increase, this seems like a no-brainer for a business model.
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I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the “other geothermal,” perhaps it should be called “geothermal assist.” Essentially it uses local near surface ground water as the end point of a heat engine. In New England, the ground temp is about 50F. In the summer air conditioning that pumps heat into that is far more efficient than pumping into 80-90F air. In the winter, pumping heat from there is far more efficient than squeezing it from sub-20F air.
http://www.northeastgeo.com/
http://www.nhec.com/residential_residentialheatpumps.php
Oh, about your map. Please scratch Yellowstone National Park off the map. It’s just far too neat a place to convert to energy production. Well, until it blows, but then people will have a different set of priorities….
Interesting. I always looked at thermal surface water as the perfect winter heat and garden provider. Lots of discussion today on this Geothermal energy that was briefly related some 15 years ago near Calistoga, California.
The State Inspector for Geothermal development in several of the ‘developing sites’ made a statement back then that has been presented today. His contention is that the really hot Geo-water is deep and lethal to most animal life. His job was to oversee the safety aspects of maintaining the separation of deep geothermal water with the man created below surface heat exchanger He advocated that Nuclear Power was safer to manipulate with the technology than influences of plate tectonics.
The Klamath Falls area, in southern Oregon, has hot water so close to the surface that some cattle ranchers have to use cooling tanks to make the water drinkable. (It’s in a rift valley, so the high temperatures are not surprising.)
The potential for earthquakes is real from geothermal. Check out the area East of Cloverdale on this map.
But I wonder about longer term impacts from extracting so much heat from the Earth’s crust. If it were developed on a massive scale and power extracted from much deeper locations (say, boreholes to near the mantle), we could possibly be faced with some unintended consequences by depleting that are of heat.
Stop or even slow volcanism and you kill the planet. I would rather go with nuclear power and recycling of spent fuel. See Scientific American, December 2005 for an article on “smarter” nuclear energy.
The Geysers is one of the biggest geothermal developments on the west coast. And it almost died due to mismanagement. The problem in any geothermal development is having the appropriate surface area for heat transfer. So, in the geysers case, they withdrew mcuh of the naturally occuring groundwater without trying to reinject, and the way subsurface environments work, once an area collapses (due to normal soil or rock hydrostatic pressures) they are difficult to open up. Geysers dodged a bullet by beginning to perform reinjection, thus making sure that the rock spaces remained open.
In dry rock geothermal, the problem is one of trying to fracture the rock to get proper heat transfer surface area. This is typically done with a mixture of high explosives and high pressure water injection. But getting those fractures to open up and then economically recovering the water – and getting proper flow regimes to start – is no simple matter.
Much of the economically available geothermal has been devloped in the continental US (outside of national parks). The new type of hot rock geothermal is still well on the horizen. THough geothermal is great, solar ironically may be more cost effective when there isn’t an available hot ground water source associated with them, and that’s saying alot. Drilling deep is expensive, and the potential return is high risk.
Crosspatch: you are putting the cart before the horse. Their are earthquakes in cloverdale (home of the geysers) because it is volcanic, not because there are geothermal power plants. IF we could make geothermal cost effective, it would have no appreciable affect on the temperature of the interior of the earth, which is driven by nuclear decay and not by some residual heat of planetary formation. We wouldn’t be slowing or stopping volcanism in the least.
For those who are interested in the safest form of nuclear power, thorium reactors are the way to go. Thorium is widely abundant, and has negative reactivity – it needs a neutron source to react at all. There are some suggestions that we could convert current nuclear reactors to thorium, and burn up all the fuel that’s slated for yucca – by burning up, I mean transmuting the long lived radioactives into shorter lived ones – on the order of 200 years and perhaps 5% of their current mass. We could easily use yucca to hold those – the big problem with yucca is that no one can predict what could occur in 10000 years. 200? We can do that standing on our heads….
I should mention that there are major differences between hot rock geothermal and the traditional geothermal. As mentioned earlier, traditional geothermal is about twice the cost of coal, which is indeed great. But hot rock geothermal is way more expensive, and the risk is very high. Most of the research sites just didn’t pan out because you can’t get enough heat transfer area or water into the rock to make it even near to being cost effective. That’s why there’s not R&D money for it in DOE’s budget. They’ve already poured a ton of money down that hole, and it came up dry. Like most hot rock geothermal.
crosspatch (08:53:56) : But I wonder about longer term impacts from extracting so much heat from the Earth’s crust.
Anything is possible, I guess. My guess is that the possibility of significant impacts is vanishingly small. But if it’s not, then as davidcobb indicated it’s an issue for oil extraction as well — especially considering that more and more of the oil reserves being found are very deep, and therefore very hot.
Likewise, sinkholes are by no means unique to geothermal heat mining. For example, Texas is dotted with them as a result of extracting oil and gas reserves. Florida also has them as a result of extracting drinking water. Bummer.
You all might also checkout what Stirling Engine Systems is doing with Solar at the Sandia Labs. Stirling engine was invented in 1815 (that’s right1) with zero emissions. Typical dish puts out enough juice for 9-12 average homes. 30%+efficiency. 100 sq miles would power most of the country, until the sun goes down. Currently under contract with the State of California.
Brendan, I beg to differ. Actually, I agree with a lot of what you said. My understanding of The Geysers site is largely consistent with what you said. I also agree that the big challenge for hot dry rock geothermal is in “stimulating” the reservoir. And if you try it and it doesn’t work you’re stuck with a dry hole and out millions of dollars. I wonder, however, how helpful the new horizontal drilling techniques used in the oil industry might be in that regard. Nonetheless I think your main point is consistent with my understanding, that HDR geothermal would benefit greatly from better techniques to identify and exploit potential reserviors. But as I said before (by way of a previous citation), many very smart people are inclined to believe that a moderate investment in R&D might change the situation dramatically.
So that’s one way I beg to differ. The other is that as the CNBC article I cited in an earlier comment indicated, there are quite a number of economically available geothermal sites available for exploitation. The second citation in Anthony’s topic corroborates that point.
Finally, I think you need to make a better case for thorium reactors. They sound very interesting. But as far as I know there aren’t any yet. No demonstration reactors, and certainly no pilot reactors. So on the RDD (research/development/deployment) curve they aren’t even out of the starting gate. Am I wrong? Frankly, I’d love to be wrong, because it sounds like a great idea. I’m just not convinced.
I wonder how many of those sites will have some endangered weed, or one-of-a-kind bacterium, or almost extinct nasal discharge or something which environMENTALists can use to block any development.
Seriously though, if they’re against oil drilling for drilling’s sake, why would they be in favor of drilling for any other sake? They don’t really want cheap and clean forms of energy, they want people gone.
Geothermal power is a viable and substantial source for power. The one mentioned in the article is called ryepatch it has never been on line. The cost and resource were not worth it at the time of inception. since then someone has taken all the electrical wiring in the plant and is now being rebuilt. In the reno nevada area there are 7 active sights generating power. More than one has multiple plants. There are two ways to use the resource one is to keep the water under pressure and not leet it go to steam and the other is to let the water go to steam and become what is called a flash plant the first is usually a binary cycle. this means the water is used to heat a motive fluid and the motive fluid flashes across the turbine in turn turning the generater and producing power. the motive fluid is then cooled and the process starts all over again, the water is then injected back into the ground where it starts its cycle all over again. the water and motive fluid never comes into contact with each other so water out heat taken out and water put back into the ground. to my knowledge there are three more geo plants in the process for central nevada. Our water is at 360 degrees f. the pump depth is approximately 1500 feet. Yes wells are expensive to drill but the return is there. There was also mention of french nuclear power plants there is at this time a nuke plant in the works back east in conjunction with the french company. i am not an engineer i just help keep one of the plants running as an I & E
Thorium reactors are further along than just paper studies. In Norway, Statkraft, Thor Energy, and Bergen Energi have applied for licenses for Thorium reactors. India has a fast breeder reactor under construction that is scheduled to be completed in 2010, and it is designed to produce Thorium fuel for Thorium reactors. Interestingly India has had a 3 stage nuclear development plan for about 50 years which was to do: (1) heavy water reactors, then (2)Uranium based reactors to produce Plutonium for reactors, and finally fast breeders to product Thorium for Thorium reactors (plus India has decent Thorium reserves which can be mined.
Anthony,
I gots a question, a poser, a conundrum. Tried to find a thread where it fit, and this is as good as it gets.
Talking about alternative energy sources – there are tradeoffs with any of them. Nuclear (which I don’t see as an “alternative” source, we should be whole hog into this) has the problem of waste disposal. Solar – the problem of manufacturing waste (pretty toxic stuff) and Watt/dollar. Wind – other than killing a few friendly flying things, not much of a downside (other than $$$) and reliability.
But what about this – there has to be an energy transfer from the prevailing wind to the turbine through the airfoil. It seems to me the wind would have less velosity after trading some energy with the tower. There is an example in sailboat races – the upwind boat can remove enough energy from the wind to slow a downwind competitor – simply by taking the energy out of the wind in that small area.
Seems to this old engineer that if we put enough windmills up, there is going to be a change in prevailing winds due to a loss of energy, and therefore a change in climate. What “enough of a loss” is is open to discussion. Do you know of any of us (bad word here) skeptics investigating this – I mean someone who’s not a knuckledragging engineer?
Thanks!
Mike
REPLY: A good place to test this would be to look at the Altamont Pass and Tehachipi mtns in California to see if downwind changes have been observed. Both places are loaded with windmills. – Anthony