Tuesday, 3 May

QGECE Weekly Seminars

The QGECE holds weekly seminars every Tuesday. These are public seminars and all interested are welcome. Last week it was the Easter break and we did not have a seminar. The week before, it was Hugh Russell talking on the use of shallow aquifers for power plant cooling.

Hugh is doing his Masters in this area. For the last six months he has been collecting data on water resources in the Eromanga basin. He is targeting depths up to 130 m. While the data is patchy at such shallow depths, it looks like the layers above the Winton formation may provide the permeability to serve as heat dumps for a geothermal power plant., The idea was first raised by Bob Collins in 2009 and Hugh took it up as his master Thesis.

This was the QGECE Seminar two weeks ago. Today's Seminar was by Tonguc Uysal, the leader of our Reservoir program. Tonguc talked about the likely sources of Australian geothermal heat.

This was a very interesting talk and it looks like, in addition to radiogenic granites, there are old magmatic events (or possibly even new in certain areas) that may be contributing heat eat to the geothermal reservoirs. Two mechanisms were mentioned, namely magmatic plumes and lithosphere thinning. It looks like this is still work in progress but the reuslts should be of great interest to the geothermal community, especially for those searching for new resoiurces closer to the population centres.

Click here for the QGECE Weekly Seminar Schedule

Click here for the rest of the blog