Thursday, 24 November 2011
QGECE AGEC2011 presentations
The Australian Geothermal Energy Conference last week in Melbourne was well attended. The QGECE staff and students made nine presentations. The titles are listed below:
- Large scale integration of geothermal energy into the Australian transmission network by Mehdi Eghbal and Tapan Kumar Saha
- QGECE Research on Heat Exchangers by K. Hooman and Z. Guan
- The QGECE Power Conversion Group by P.A. Jacobs, A. Rowlands, H. Gurgenci, E. Sauret, P. Petrie-Repar, A. Atrens, C. Ventura, R. Singh, J. Czapla, H. Russell, B. Twomey, J. Zhang
- Zircon chronochemistry of high heat-producing granites in Queensland and Europe V. Marshall, K. Knesel and S.E. Bryan
- Synchysite from the Soultz high-heat producing monzogranite, Soultz-sous-Forêts, France: Implications for titanite destabilisation and differential REE and Th mobility in hydrothermal systems Alexander W. Middleton, I. Tonguc Uysal, H.-J. Förster and Suzanne D. Golding
- Geological Study – Seasonal Storage of Air-Cooled Water for Arid Zone Geothermal Power Plants by Hugh Russell
- A new database compilation of whole-rock chemical and geochronological data of igneous rocks in Queensland: A new resource for HDR geothermal resource exploration. C.Siegel, S. Bryan, D. Purdy, D. Gust, C.Allen, T.Uysal, and D. Champion
- QGECE research on delineation of Australian geothermal resources by I.Tonguç Uysal, Massimo Gasparon, and Scott E. Bryan
- What will make EGS geothermal energy a viable Australian renewable energy option? by Hal Gurgenci (Extended Abstract and Presentation)
My presentation was on the last day of the conference. I addressed the issue of the commercial viability of power generration from an EGS geothermal resource and identified research areas that will increase this viability.
I presented an estimate for what the cost of geothermal electricity could be in Australia for a high-temperature EGS resource using the state-of-the-art EGS technology and what improvements are required to make it commercially viable. To represent the state-of-the-art, the Geothermal Electricity Technology Evaluation Model (GETEM) will be used. This is an economics/performance spreadsheet model developed by the US Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Program to assess power generation costs and the potential for technology improvements to impact those generation costs. The GETEM Version 2009-A15 was used. This was the most recent GETEM model before the beta version of a new version was released at the GTP Review in Maryland in June 2011.
The cost of geothermal electricity was calculated for a hypothetical geothermal resource and plant defined with the following parameters.
| Brine temperature |
250 oC |
| Well depth |
4500 m |
| Power plant |
State-of-the-art binary plant with air-cooled condensers |
| Plant size |
20 MWe |
All papers are posted on the conference web site. If you would like to see the QGECE presentations, please e-mail the authors using the links I provided above.
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