Thursday, 11 February

Zero Emission Electricity To Power The Galilee Basin

It was announced last Monday that a subsidiary of Clive Palmer’s Resourcehouse Ltd will be building six mines in Galilee Basin to export 30 million tonnes. Mining requires electrical power and to fuel future growth in Galilee Basin a new 1000-MW power station may be needed.

Is it possible to power the development of the present and future mining prospects in the Galilee basin by zero-emission electricity?

I think we can say a cautious yes.

Followers of this blog know that one of the objectives of our research is a synergistic combination of clean coal and geothermal technologies, a.k.a. superritical CO2 thermosiphon. This has the capability to produce zero-emission electricity for the future development of the Galilee Basin from a combination of coal-fired and geothermal power plants.

We issued a press release yesterday and the following lines are copied from there.

The Queensland Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence is working with American and Japanese colleagues towards a concept called the supercritical CO2 thermosiphon (see Figure 1). This is a new geothermal concept where, instead of water traditionally used in conventional geothermal power plants, supercritical CO2 is sent down to extract the reservoir heat, hot CO2 rises to the surface and drives a turbo-generator to produce electricity, and then is cooled and sent back underground to repeat the cycle. Very favourable thermodynamic properties of CO2 make this possible so that the two wells operate as a self-sustaining heat pump that brings the subterranean heat to the surface and transforms it to electricity. During the last round of the Geothermal Stimulus funding in USA, four projects received federal funding to pursue different aspects of this concept with a total project funding of $15 million dollars. Here in Australia, the QGECE is working to develop turbines, heat exchangers and other plant equipment for supercritical CO2 cycles, at the power conversion laboratory at the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, The University of Queensland.

The concept has the potential to increase the geothermal power conversion efficiencies by up to 50%. Sequestration of CO2 captured from coal-fired power plants is an auxiliary benefit since access to large quantities of CO2 is essential, first, to start the reservoir and, then possibly, to make up for the fraction of CO2 trapped underground.

Although this needs to be confirmed with further exploration, there are indications that a significant geothermal heat source may exist in the Drummond Basin. This is the late Carboniferous granite structure underneath the Galilee Basin.

Therefore we believe that the expected development in the Galiee Basin can be powered by a zero-emission CO2 geothermal siphon plant exploiting the heat of the Drummond geothermal resource by using the CO2 emissions captured from coal-fired power generation.

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