Monday, 8 February
Geothermal Energy in Turkey
I came back from my Christmas holiday in Turkey. It turned out to be a busman's holiday. The first week of my visit coincided with the TMMOB Geothermal Congress. TMMOB is the equivalent of Engineers Australia and I thought it would be a good idea to submit a paper to that Congress. I made a presentation on the Australian geothermal sector and the QGECE research. Click on my paper and my presentation . The text is in Turkish but you might be able to get the gist of what I talked about from the figures and charts.
There is a flurry of activity going on in Turkey at the moment in the geothermal energy sector. While the activities cover electricity generation and direct use for space and process heating, my interest was mostly on the former, reflecting the QGECE research focus. The present installed electricity generation capacity in Turkey is about 45000 MWe on paper. At the current capacity factors, this would cover the demand by the end of 2010 but no more. Turkey needs new capacity of 2000-3000 MWe every year. In the last 10 years, most of this growth has been met by gas power plants burning natural gas imported from Russia and other countries. The future uncertainty about the cost of natural gas is a strong motivation to look for alternative sources. The country has huge resources of brown coal. The quality is similar to the brown coal being used in Victoria; and as in Victoria, the electricity from brown coal could be very costly if there is a future international framework that costs CO2 emissions. Turkey has no nuclear power plants yet but the construction for one may start within a year. The limited hydroelectric resources are subject to the vagaries of the nature and there is increasing public opposition to the use of smaller creeks for hydroelectric power generation.
The electricity prices in Turkey are much higher than Australia as shown in the following table:
| |
Daytime
|
Nighttime
|
| Industrial tariff, medium-voltage supply (kr/kWh) |
18.556
|
10.336
|
| Industrial tariff, low-voltage supply (Kr/kWh) |
19.284
|
11.067
|
| Retail commercial (Kr/kWh) |
25.023
|
15.010
|
| Retail residential (Kr/kWh) |
21.376
|
11.490
|
| 1 Kr (kurush) = 0.77 Australian cents |
A high price for electricity by itself does not make geothermal electricity attractive for private investors, who are always the lowest-cost option and, for Turkey that does not have good-quality coal reserves, this is import coal or natural gas at the current prices of these commodities. Although geothermal investments will make money (it is true; they would make money even beyond the easy geothermal reserves currently being exploited now), a prudent investor will not invest in geothermal energy in Turkey if his aim is to maximise the return on his investment. Therefore, it is clear that most of the new investment will be directed towards gas or imported coal. Since the prices are already quite high, feed-in tariffs by themselves will not be enough to motivate large levels of geothermal investment. In the humble opinion of this observer, a more intrusive government intervention is necesary. This can be either by an intially state-owned investment; or by regulating the make-up of the electricity sector so that licences would not be given for natural gas and coal beyond a certain fraction, forcing the investors into other areas. I bnelieve it is worth for the governmentr to consider such alternatives because of the size of the potential prize.
Turkey is rich in surface geothermal resources. Through most of the Western regions of the country, artesian hot springs provide hot water at around 100 oC and there is a hospitality sector capitalising on health use of such springs. There is a fairly good understanding of the underground resource down to 2000m. The following chart plots the well temperatures for a few locations:
There is little information for rock temperatures below 2000 m. There is a map published in a EU web site about the 5000-m rock temperatures in Europe, and according to that map, the Western Anatolia is on fire. This is shown in the following chart:
The above two maps suggest that Turkey has the potential to generate a lot more than the present ~60MW from geothermal energy. At the retail prices shown earlier, this should be possible without a subsidy although, to secure the required finance, a guaranteed feed-in tariff would probably be needed but fixed for the life of the plant. The feed-in tariff does not have to be much higher than the current prices, which are already very high. In spite of this huge potential, the government and industry circles are just becoming aware of the geothermal potential of the country. I hope I helped raising the public awareness by my presentations, participation in a TV Panel Discussion on geothermal energy and, later in January, in a one-hour interview on geothermal energy on one of the national channels, which was actually broadcast after I returned to Brisbane.
On 17 January, I was the keynote speaker in a Geothermal Energy Workshop held in Afyon Karahisar. This is a town known for its hot springs and the local industry is very interested in possibilities of exploiting its geothermal resources for electricity generation. Here I had two hours to talk and I was able to comment a bit more on what I think as the future possibilities for the Turkish geothermal sector in the light of what is happening elsewhere in the world. Here is my Afyon presentation.
In Ankara and in Afyon and in the follow-up meetings with the companies and the universities, I have been able to meet most of the people in the government departments and the industry who are interested in geothermal industry. Some of the Turkish universities are doing good work and there are possibilities for the QGECE to work with them in joint projects. We will pursue these possibilities. I suspect there might also be lessons for the future Australian HSA operations to learn from the Turkish experience and vice versa.
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