Hal Gurgenci's Geothermal Blog - Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence at The University of Queensland

Tuesday, 24 November

It is only a fortnight before the UN COP15 meeting in Copenhagen. The COP15 means the 15th Conference of the Parties, where the "Parties" is the short of "Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)". The COP14 was in Poznan and it passed without much public attention. In contrast, the COP15 has been attracting a lot of media space because of the raised expectations about an outcome from this Conference about some form of united action against climate change.

Yesterday, I received the November copy of the Power Engineering International, which allocated its editorial to Clean Coal in expectation of the COP15 discussions on this topic. I must admit that I do not know enough about this area to make any useful comments but I thought it was strange that there had not yet been a large enough field demonstration project in this area considering its importance and the financial power of the stakeholders. According to the PEI Editorial, this might be changing, although most of the attention is focussed on "capture" with little note of "storage". The European Union last month proposed six CCS projects to receive a total of 1 billion euros. A number of different capture technologies are to be trialled in these projects. There are other projects also coming on stream in the coming years. While duly reporting on these projects, the editorial laments that the attention given to storage of the captured CO2 is nowhere near the effort spent on capture technologies. In fact, the title is "We can capture carbon, but can we store it?". I quote from the Editorial: "Is there sufficient space in the Earth's subsurface to store this (a mind-blowing scale of many billions of tonnes per year of) CO2. The answer to this question at the moment is quite simply, we don't know".

These are the new large-scale carbon projects mentioned in the Editorial:

Powerfuel Power's Hatfield IGCC power plant in the UK (funded by the EU)
Vattenfalls's Jaenschwalde plant with oxyfuel combustion in Germany (funded by the EU)
Poland's Belchatow power station using an advanced amine post-combustion capture process (funded by the EU)
The Meri-Pori CCS project of the Finnish utilities Fortum and Teollisuuden Voima Oyj in partnership with Siemens to treat approximately 50% of the flue gas with the aim of capturing 90% of the CO2 in the treated stream
US Wisconsin Pleasant Prairie power plant of the utility company We Energies that uses an advanced chilled ammonia process to capture over 90% of the flue stream
TransAlta of Canada and Alstom to construct a large-scale CCS facility in Alberta in partnership with the independent power produced Capital Power

The situation in Australia is murky at the moment but it will get clarified by June 2010. It appears that a recent Geoscience assessment will be used to choose up to four industrial-scale projects to be funded with the $2.4billion set aside in the May budget's "CCS flagships" program. All these developments are to be applauded. At the moment clean coal has a credibility problem allowing some pundits (Al Gore) to liken it to "healthy cigarettes". This is probably because the technology has not been demonstrated yet in the field at a scale large enough to be convincing. I know that the similar applies to the EGS or HFR geothermal as well. But I think the geothermal energy sector has the excuse that the players are much smaller and hardly with the financial muscle available to the coal mining companies and the owners of the coal-fired power generators. Having said that the HFR geothermal energy may beat Clean Coal to the first large-scale demonstration plant (or two) with the Innamincka and Paralana projects. Keep your fingers crossed.

Monday, 23 November

This morning, I made a presentation to the AJM Galilee Basin Coal & Energy Investment Conference. My presentation on the geothermal energy potential in the Basin was the end of a session with several excellent presentations on coal and gas projects and the infrastructure developments in the Galilee Basin. The Galilee Basin appears to be the next coal and gas frontier for Queensland, following the past successes in Surat and Bowen basins. It is difficult to make categorical statements about the geothermal potential in the Galilee basin because we do not have enough information. As applies to the rest of Queensland, the spatial distribution of the heat producing granites is poorly constrained. Preliminary results suggest a significant HFR potential for the Drummond basin but more work is needed to confirm it. One indicator is the surface concentration of heat producing elements, reported as 4 PPM for Uranium and 29 PPM for Thorium in the Drummond basin. These should be compared to the average crust concentrations for U and Th as 3 and 11 PM, respectively.

In addition to the HFR in the south-east part of the Basin, towards the north edge of the Basin, where it overlaps the great Artesian basin, there is significant potential for HSA geothermal. In fact, some tenements were taken in this area by Clean Energy Australasia, possibly to produce electricity for Mount Isa region and the rest of NW Queensland. Apparently, the lack of access to cheap electricity is one of the major impediments towards development of NW Queensland. Some speakers at the Conference suggested that the industry in Mt Isa might be paying for their electricity contracts at rates above 10 cents/kWh. The exact tariffs are confidential since these are contracts between the mines and the utility companies. If these "above 10" rates start getting into the teens, geothermal electricity suddenly starts becoming very competitive.

Friday, 20 November

I have not had a blog entry for ten days. There are three reasons:

The Australian Geothermal Energy Conference on 10-13 November (the picture os from the Conference dinner and from left to right you see Adrian larkin, Bahay Ozcakmak, and Hal gurgenci)
the ATSE Energy Conference on 16-17 November (although I only attended the first day)
the 20 3rd year design report that I had to read and mark by the end of this week before the grade upload deadline.

I am pleased to say that I just finished my marking and completed my grade table. One big load off my shoulders. If you are interested, the design project objective was to design a natural draft dry cooling tower for a 50-MWe geothermal power plant using a novel low-cost construction technology. While most of the reports I read and marked were quite ho-hum, there were a few which gave me pleasure to read them and reminded me again why I chose to become a teacher.

The AGEA/AGEG Australian Geothermal Conference was an unequivocal success. This is not only my impression. Those of the 400 delegates that attended the Conference seemd all happy about the event. If you missed it, then you have to wait until next year, when it looks like is going to be held in Adelaide.

What has been hapening in Australia and the world in the sector while I was marking design assignments?

Joe Reichman issued a press release and ABC News covers it as follows: "Clean Energy Australasia is planning a pilot plant south of the Cannington mine near Mount Isa. If it is successful the company says other geothermal power stations could follow in western Queensland, generating hundreds of jobs. The managing director, Joe Reichman, says the initial pilot plant could make the region a powerhouse of the state."

Projects like these could make Northern Queensland a contender for placement of new aluminium smelters utilising zero-emission electricity. The Reuters reported yesterday for example that Century Aluminum Co plans to restart construction at its Helguvik greenfield smelter project in Iceland and to produce its first metal at the plant by early 2012. Century halted construction on the project during fourth quarter of 2008, when demand for aluminum, and consequently aluminum prices, plummeted at the onset of global financial crisis. It looks like they think we are getting out of the GFC. Century already operates the Grundartangi smelter in Iceland, which the company says was able to break even when aluminum fell to $1,275 a tonne, a 7-1/2-year low, in March because of low power costs partly using geothermal energy. This is without any new costs kick in for crabon-emitting electricity alternatives.

Tuesday, 10 November

The Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson AM MP, today awarded $235 million to four commercial-scale renewable energy projects from the Renewable Energy Demonstration Program (REDP). I am very pleased to see that two of these went to the two leading geothermal aspirants: Geodynamics and Petratherm.

Geodynamics received $90m towards the construction of a 25-MW demonstration project in Innamincka. The funding will be staged with the final grant payment to follow the commissioning of the plant, expected to occur in late 2013. This will be the world's first multi-well hot fractured rock power project.

The second grant in the geothermal area went towards Petratherm's 30MW Paralana Geothermal Energy Project, strategically located near the Beverley uranium mine. The $63m-grant was especially timely for Petratherm and its joint venture partners, Beach Petroleum and TRUenergy Geothermal, who advised yesterday that the Paralana 2 deep injector well reached its target depth of 4012 metres.

The success in their bids will be a major boost to the two companies and the Australian geothermal sector in general. We are all waiting to hear unequivocal success stories that prove sustained production from a geothermal reservoir in Australian conditions. These grants pave the way towards achieving this aim. I understand that the funding provided under the program is on a 2:1 basis, where the recipient invests $2 for every $1 provided under the grant. This means that about half a billion dollars will be spent by these two companies over the next 4-5 years. Good news for Australia, good news for the sector. Congratulations Petrathem and Geodynamics.

Friday, 6 November

I have expressed a number of times in this blog how optimistic I am about the prospects of geothermal energy and, as a logical follow-up, the financial prospects for the manufacturers supplying the geothermal electricity sector. You do not need to gaze into a crystal ball to conclude that, if the geothermal energy will provide 6000 MWe in Australia by 2030 as most people believe it would, then someone will have to manufacture and sell power plant equipment to produce these 6000 megawatts. At a cost of $2m per MW, this would be worth $12 billions in today's prices. Multiply it across the globe and you have a multi-trillion-dollar industry that will have to spring up from almost nothing in the next 20-30 years. And this would be just the starting point because we do not expect the geothermal sector to stop at that level. As a consequenct, the geothermal plant equipment and supply sector could have an annual turnover of tens of billions of dollars a year in twenty years time and just starting to grow. The astute financial analysts already note this. One harbinger of this buoyant future for the geothermal supply industries is the apparently unstoppable rise of the Ormat Technologies. This US subsidiary of Ormat, the Ormat Technologies Inc published its financial report for the third quarter of 2009 yesterday. The company reports that the equipment sales boosted the its revenue and profits. Ormat Technologies posted $119.8 million revenue for the third quarter, 20.2% more than the $99.7 million for the corresponding quarter of 2008. The product segment revenue rose 65.5% to $51.1 million for the third quarter from $30.9 million for the corresponding quarter, thanks to equipment procurement contracts for the construction of three large binary geothermal projects in Nevada, New Zealand, and Costa Rica.

As a digression, my first job after my PhD was a post-doctoral fellowship with the Solar Energy research Centre of the University of Queensland in early 1980's. At that time, I had the chance to work with a 15-kWe Organic Rankine Cycle engine supplied by Ormat Industries. Unfortunately, I have not retained a photo of it but we were exploring its use for solar thermal power conversion and I remember it having quite poor off-design and part-load efficiencies. Ormat obviously has come a long way since then. At that time Ormat was a company just coming out of in Israel, where it had been in operation since 1965 since the founding of the husband-and-wife company Ormat Turbines by Lucien and Dita Bronicki in that year to commercialise the Organic Rankine Cycle technology for power generation from low- to medium-temperature heat. In the 1980’s Ormat built and operated one of the world's first power stations to produce electricity from solar energy; the plant was located just north of the Dead Sea in Israel and was using a salt-saturated pond (the so-called solar pond) to collect and store the solar energy. I remember us too in Brisbane working in that area duplicating the work as well as trying various different cover options on the pond to increase the pond temperatures and hence the conversion efficiencies.

Thursday, 5 November

While Australia is pursuing HFR and HSA geothermal resources, both of which require slightly different approaches compared to conventional geothermal technology, one of the biggest conventional geothermal resource potentials in the world is in Indonesia. Indonesian geothermal resource potential is estimated at 27510 megawatts. But the current installed capacaity is only slightly over 1000 MWe or about 5% of this capacity. The aim of the Indonesian government is to increase the installed capacity to 9500 MWe of geothermal capacity by 2025. Towards this aim, the Indonesian company Star Energy received a $50m-loan from GE Financial Services yesterday to expand the Wayang Windu plant, currently producing 220 MWe. The plant recently has been expanded by a second turbine-generator unit, the design and construction of which supervised by Maunsell AECOM. The original plant had the fame of owning the biggest single geothermal turbine in the world currently delivering 110 MW of electricity into the Indonesian national grid. So unless someone bought a larger turbine in the last three years, the Wayang Windu now must have the fame of owning the world's two largest geothermal turbines. In fact, when opening the second turbine unit earlier this year, the Star Energy CEO announced that they would double the plant capacity again in the next 3 years by adding two more units of the same capacity, bringing the total Wayang Windu capacity to over 400MWe. This would make it indeed one of the world's largest geohermal plants to all indices of measurement. The $50m loan agreement signed off a few days ago between GE and Start Energy must be one of the steps leading in that direction.

The Wayang Windu plant taps into naturally occurring underground pockets of steam and hot water, with wells as deep as 3 kms. The geothermal fluid is brought to the surface, it is flashed before running through the turbine. The turbine exhaust steam is condensed and reinjected. The cooling system is a closed circuit consisting of a direct contact condenser and a wet cooling tower. The sketch shows the lay-out of the first 110-MW unit from an article published in the Fuji Technology Review in 2001. I copy the major specifications of the turbine from the same source:

Type: single cylinder, double flow and condensing type
Output : 110 MW
Inlet steam conditions : 1.02 MPa and 181 oC
Exhaust pressure : 0.012 MPa
Number of stages : 2(flows) x 8
Length of LSB (Last Stage Blades) : 697 mm
Bearing span : 5800 mm
Speed : 3000 RPM

Wednesday, 4 November

30 October 2009 may turn out to be an important milestone for the transition of the global energy infrastructure from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Last Friday, DESERTEC Foundation and twelve European companies some of which are the giants of the European energy sector signed an agreement to form the DII GmbH. The companies are ABB, ABENGOA Solar, Cevital, Deutsche Bank, E.ON, HSH Nordbank, MAN Solar Millennium, Munich Re, M+W Zander, RWE, SCHOTT Solar and Siemens. The aim of the DII will be to implement the DESERTEC concept. Paul van Son was appointed as the CEO of the newsly-formed DII. The grand vision of the Desertec initiative is to provide by 2050 about 700 TWh/y of solar electricity from 20-40 different locations in the Middle East and North Africa to the main centres of demand in Europe. This electricity will be transmitted by HVDC transmission lines with a capacity of 2.5-5.0 GW each. By 2050, the European consumption is likely to increase to and stabilize at a value of about 4000 TWh/year. So the Desertec aim is to provide about 18% of this amount. The figure shows the concept of the supergrid that will connect the concentrating solar power plants in North Africa to Europe.

You may remember my blog entry on 17 July announcing these 12 companies signing an MOU to develop the Desertec Industrial Initiative – a EUR400bn (US$560bn) plan to build vast solar arrays in Africa and the Middle East and transmit the power to Europe. Only 0.25% of the required funding had been secured in July with a EUR1b grant from EU. There are no news of new funding yet but the formation of the DII last week suggests the twelve companies are serious in their pursuit. The news about Siemens buying Solel two weeks ago to expand its capabilities in solar thermal area gains more significance when considered in the context of Siemens being one of the twelve DII companies. Solel was set up in 1992 by former Luz International staff. Luz of course is the Israeli company credited as being the "inventor" of concentrating solar power by building 9 CSP plants in the California's Mojave desert in late '80s and '90s. These plants still operate today generating a total of 354 MW of electricity. Luz went bankrupt with deregulation and cessation of generous tax credits for renewable power. However, with the changing times, the LUZ II or Solel seemed to be doing well. According to the Power Engineering international, Solel posted revenues of $90m in 2009, doubling the $40m revenue it posted last year. Siemens is already the world leader in the solar thermal power plant steam turbine market with 80 per cent of market share, and hopes that with the acquisition of Solel they will be able to develop technology as the market grows. Siemens also acquired a 28 per cent stake in Archimedes Solar Energy in March 2009, an Italian based company which has developed technology for receiver tubes. Siemens' environmental portfolio posted revenue of nearly $19bn in 2008 and Siemens is currently projecting annual double-digit growth rates for concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) plants by 2020.

Are there lessons to learn and inspiration to draw for Australia? An Australian interior providing gigawatts of electricity from geothermal and solar thermal sources providing electricity for the coasts while enabling desalination of salty quifers to open new tracts of land in the interior for agricultural and other settlement purposes: a pipe dream? Maybe not. If it can be done in Europe across the Mediterranean sea as well as the country boundaries why not in a single stable political entity such as Australia.

Tuesday, 3 November

Tuesday is the weekly QGECE seminar day. Today's speaker is Mostafa Odabaee. Mostafa is doing his Masters with the Centre. Today he will talk about the progress in his research on metal foam heat exchangers. This is a project we started earlier this year and I was not sure where it was going to lead. We started from the basic premise that, in a natural dry cooling tower, the heat exchangers account for about two-thirds of the total tower cost. The present heat exchanger technology is finned tube bundles. We asked ourselves the question if we could do better by using a newer technology, i.e. metal foams. Mostafa's results so far show that metal foams offer significant advantages over finned tubes. For example, a 50-MWe geothermal plant needs to dump about 300 MW of waste heat depending on its efficiency. According to Mostafa's results, 52 bays of metal foam heat exchangers would be able to dump this to air whereas 200+ bays of finned-tube bundles would be required to do the same job. This has significant implications, metal foam heat exchangers would probably cost about one-quarter of the finned tube counterparts and, as importantly, they would offer a much more compact altetrnative. The latter point is important because it would make it possible to fit the heat exchanger bundles inside the tower, which is an important advantages in areas where dust storms are a frequent event. The sketch shows the two alternative heat exchanger placement options for natural draft dry cooling towers. In the vertical arrangement, the heat exchanger bundles are placed around the skirt of the tower and therefore are exposed to dust and other elements. In the horizontal arrangement, they are placed on an elevated plane inside the tower and the structure of the tower protects them from possible dust storms.

Maybe not in Australia yet but around the globe, the stars are aligned favourably for the renewable energy companies. One of these stars is the strong renewable energy push coming from the Obama administration. But according to the US investment analyst, Jeff Siegel, it is not the only one. In an article published yesterday, he argues that the basic fundamentals of supply and demand no longer favor oil over the long term. Climate-change legislation (and to a lesser extent, coal reserves, which are not enough for 250 years but rather about 100 years, according to a 2007 National Research Council report) will certainly impede coal-fired power-plant development. And unless upfront capital, decommissioning, and waste-storage costs come down for nuclear, he doesn't believe it’ll be the solution to our energy woes despite its carbon advantage. So the bottom line according to Jeff Siegel is that we can no longer safely rely on only nonrenewable resources to supply all our power generation. And any investor who counts out renewable energy at this point is going to miss out on a lot of money. Some of his favourite renewable energy stocks include First Solar, US Geothermal, Ormat technologies, Yingli Green Energy, EnerNOC Inc, SunPower, SolarFun, Vestas (Copenhagen:VWS).

Monday, 2 November

The Solar Flagships program was announced in May 2009. It allocated $1.5b to achieve a target of 1000MWe from four solar power stations. Since then, Boston Consulting Group(BCG) has been conducting a survey of the stakeholders. Following the BCG survey, the Commonwealth Government last week issued the Solar Flagships Program Factsheet that lists the changes to the Solar Flagship program. These are some of the highlights of the update:

The program will only support commercially proven solar technologies. "Commercially proven" technologies are defined as those technologies "that have been demonstrated at an operational level of at least 30MW for twelve months or with a replicable module below 30 MW"
The 1st round will be held in 2010 to select one solar thermal and one PV project with a target of up to 400MW combined generation capacity
Energy storage is no longer an obligation but proposals with energy storage will be "viewed favourably."
Hybrid solar thermal plants will be allowed that combines solar energy with gas or other types of renewable energy as long as the secondary input remains below 15% of the total electricity output.
Funding from the Solar Flagships program will be in addition to revenues projects earn from sale of electricity and Renewable Energy Certificates.

"Project proponents will be required to demonstrate that they have sought funding for any project proposal at a ratio of at least two dollars from private and state or territory government sources for every dollar from the Solar Flagships program" I do not quite understand how this clause will operate in practice. Will the good intentions and honest effort to raise funds from other means be sufficient? I expect this to be clarified in the selection guidelines to be announced later this year.

From my point of view, I think the limit of 15% on the secondary source is unfortunate. I understand that this probably was put there to exclude proposals where solar energy is considered as feedwater heater in CCGT plants or similar. But this aim could have been achieved by requiring this limit to be applied only where the secondary source is not a renewable source. As it is now, the Solar Flagships program excludes some very exciting combinations of geothermal and solar thermal energy. It is disappointing. This does not mean that this Solar Flagships program update totally excludes geothermal+solar hybrids. It does not and there still are some interesting possibilities. But it would have been much more interesting if the 15% limit did not apply to renewable energy or at least applied at a higher level.

Regarding geothermal energy around the globe, the Nicaraguan government awarded two concessions to Magma Energy and its partner Polaris Geothermal Inc to develop the geothermal energy potential in two concessions, Volcn Mombacho and Caldera de Apoyo, both under the volcanic mountains along the Pacific Coast. Magma said that the exploration of each of the concessions may cover about 60 million square miles. The two Canadian companies committed spending $50m to develop the two sites for geothermal power generation. Exploration will start in 2010.

Friday, 30 October

US DoE Secretary Stephen Chu announced yesterday up to US$338m (A$375) for developing and demonstrating advanced geothermal technologies. This is part of the Recovery Act funding to stimulate the American economy to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis. It is interesting how different governments approach the stimulus spending differently. A comparison with the steering of the Australian stimulus spending would probably be particularly interesting. The US package announced yesterday will support 123 projects in 39 states with the grants being matched more than one-on-one so that yesterday's announcement means that a total of $691m (A$768m) will be spent on geothermal technology R&D in USA over the next three years (most projects have a time scale of threee years).

I note some of the project titles that are of particular interest to the QGECE's research interests:

Supercritical CO2 Geothermal Siphon:

$1,550,018 to the University of Minnesota to develop a model to evaluate the potential of CO2 as a heat transfer fluid
$3,000,000 to Symmyx Technologies Inc of Sunnyvale, California, to model the chemical interactions between geothermal rocks, supercritical carbon dioxide and water
$944,707 to the University of Utah to develop a chemical model to predict the interactions between supercritical carbon dioxide and rock in EGS reservoirs.
$1,339,591 to the Indiana Institute of Technology to install a Ground Source Heat Pump (GHP)system that will use CO2 as the cooling medium
Power conversion and EGS Power Plants
$1,047,714 to Johnson Controls Inc to install a low temperature unit on the Oregon Institute of Technology Campus (this is only of interest to me because it is another example of Johnson Controls entering the geothermal plant equipment business -- see my blog entry a few days ago on this company)
$1,199,928 to the United Technologies Research Center for hybrid water/air-cooled condensers to reduce water consumption and to improve cooling of binary power plants in an enhanced turbine geothermal binary system
$3,000,000 to the GE Global Research, Niskayuna, New York, to develop new fluids for binary system power plants that will increase the plant efficiency and maximize output
$1,823,969 to the United Technologies Research Center to identify and test more efficient heat transfer fluids for binary power plants
$1,243,624 to the Gas Equipment Engineering Corporation, Milford, Connecticut, to create an across-the-board analysis of the costs of building and operating a 50 MW EGS powerplant. This model will be used to predict future development costs, as well as guide research and financial incentive development
$549,148 to the MIT to develop a decision analysis tool to help reduce EGS costs
The following are not in our research area but sound interesting:
$380,156 to the California State University in Long Beach to use radar technology to track "tracer" fluids as they move through fractured rock in an EGS system. They will track the pathways and heat exchange properties of the reservoir and create a model to accurately predict these properties in future projects
$1,840,000 to the Power Environmental and Energy Research Institute, Nathrop, Colorado, to develop a model to compare tracer fluids used to help visualize EGS reservoirs
$5,000,000 to the Baker hughes Oilfield Operations, The Woodlands, Texas, to develop a directional drilling system that can withstand temperatures up to 300 degrees C including the drill bit, downhole motor with directional control capabilities, and a designed-for-purpose drilling
$5,000,000 to Potter Drilling, Raymond, California, to further develop their Hydrothermal Spallation Drilling System (see my earlier blogds on this technology, which looks very promising)
$4,731,449 to Schlumberger to develop drilling tools that can perform at temperatures up to 300 ^oC

$1,824,281 to the University of California, Berkeley, to develop novel pressure and temperature sensors for permanent well sensing at high temperatures

The full list of the funded projects can be fund on the DoE web site.

The above is one of the award schemes in the USA. It appears there is a plethora of state and federal schemes. In fact, the funding structures are complex enough for someone to find it worthwhile to provide advice on it. Greentech Media reports that Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati has launched a web portal primarily for investors and startups that tracks grants, loan guarantees and other financing mechanisms available at the state and local level. The site, which is based on Wilson's research and was set up with help from the Cleantech Group, breaks up the proposals into categories: green building, geothermal, etc. Check it out at Wilson's website.

Thursday, 29 October

It looks like somebody is taking the lead commercially with the supercritical CO2 geothermal siphon idea. Greenfire Energy is a start-up company based in Salt lake City, Utah. I have known for some time its intentions to pursue the CO2 geothermal siphon idea. The Greenfire co-founder Mark Muir announced yesterday that the company will be vigorously pursuing this idea towards a field demonstration in five years, although he acknowledged that he will need funding that he does not have yet. "It's not inconceivable for the money to come from smart venture capital" but the likely source would be funding from the coal industry, "because its a matter of life and death in a carbon constrained world," according to Muir. Muir estimates that 5 percent of the world's coal plants might be eligible for the GreenFire CCS technique. One thing I am not too sure about the Greenfire concept is their proposed use of a "free piston linear alternator" to harvest the power of the hot pressurised CO2 coming up the production well. There is nothing wrong with linear engines in relatively small power applications, i.e. up to generating capacities of several megawatts. After all, as Peter Jacobs pointed out when I told him of the Greenfire proposal this morning, piston-driven steam engines powered the industrial revolution for two hundred years before steam turbines took over. However, I find it difficult to imagine a 50-MW plant using this technology. For such large power applications, I think my money would be on a supercritical CO2 turbine to be developed and demonstrated by Peter and company over the next several years.

In further news about the Eden geothermal project in Cornwall, the energy manager of the project, Matt Hastings, reiterated that the concept is still drilling two wells 4-km deep to generate three megawatts of electricity and district heating. He is hoping to submit engineering proposals in January 2010. It looks like they are going to take the Landau plant as an example with an isopentane ORC engine providing the power conversion.

In this blog, I mentioned last month about the QGECE researcher Dr Zhiqiang Guan receiving the 2009 Queensland International Fellowship in Renewable Energy area. At the time of the award ceremony, Dr Guan was already in China as part of his project and the award was received by his son Guang Guan, who is also going to become a mechanical engineer and is one of the best students of our School graduating next year. Queensland Government has now posted a page on the award ceremony and you can see Guang Guan with the other fellowship recipients there. He stands second from the right.

Wednesday, 28 October

Yesterday I quoted a US DoE announcement about US$9.1m of the US$151m having been given to Foro Energy Inc to demonstrate a new hybrid thermal/mechanical drilling technology suitable for drilling basement rock to access HFR geothermal resources. I am still trying to learn more about the Foro Energy and this "hybrid" drilling technology. An investment web site in USA yesterday confirmed my first impression that Foro was incubated in Cambridge, MA. Apparently, it has also been able to raise roughly $12.5 million in venture funding from Waltham, MA-based North Bridge Venture Partners and CMEA Capital of San Francisco. On the nature of the technology, there is only spoeculation at this stage. The moniker "Hybrid thermal/mechanical drilling technology" implies using thermal energy to soften crystalline rock so that drill bits can penetrate it with less wear. It is not clear how the heat is delivered to the rock. You hope that it is a credible technology because this was the largest award in this round of funding. The second largest piece of funding (US$9m) went to Du Pont for a project trying to produce butanol from seaweed.

While exciting things are happening in the USA, it looks like the European Union will be following suit soon. A London-based investment analysis firm Frost&Sullivan issued a report yesterday where they expect the geothermal industry to steadily gather steam in the coming years, despite the current economic situation and restraining factors such as high initial investment costs. Frost & Sullivan finds that the European Geothermal Energy Market reached installed capacity of 1,558MW in 2009 and estimates this to reach close to 4,000MW in 2016 once drilling costs are reduced and become more independent of the oil and gas industries. The largest European markets for geothermal energy today are noted as Italy, Iceland, Turkey, Germany and France, followed by Portugal, Austria, Spain, Hungary and the UK. While for some countries like Iceland, geothermal is the main electric power or energy resource, for others including Italy, Turkey and Germany, it will complement other energy sources. The Frost&Sullivan report concludes by noting that "large scale investment should be earmarked for infrastructure, drilling and resource exploration. Society and investors should be educated about the benefits of geothermal energy."

It makes sense to follow this report on European geothermal investment opportunities with an announcement from Fraport, the owner and operator of Frankfurt Airport in Germany. According to local news, Fraport has teamed up with D & S Geo Innogy and Daldrup & Söhne to explore the potential of developing a deep geothermal power plant in Walldorf, Germany to produce electricity and heat to power and heat the airport. Geologically, the Walldorf field belongs to the Upper Rhine Rift, an area that covers some 100km². Over the next few months, a series of seismic explorations will be conducted to give the companies an idea of its geothermal potential. The picture on the right is the Unterhaching power plant near Munchen (about 320 km south east of Frankfurt), which was opened in June this year. The Unterhaching plant is one of the few geothermal power plants using Kalina cycle.

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