Archive for the 'Geothermal' Category
Initial Testing at Thermo Completed
Attribution: Raser Technologies
Raser Technologies has now entered the power production business as their Thermo plant in Beaver County, Utah comes online. There are three noteworthy aspects of this project:
- Speed. This plant moved from concept to production in 18 months, breaking the land-world speed record for geothermal plant development.
- Resource. This is a low temperature, high flow rate resource unlike most geothermal fields where the resource is usually in excess of 200 C. Such resources have been thought in the past to be non-viable as recently as five years ago.
- Design. Traditionally, geothermal plants are optimized for the specific resource. In this case, 50 UTC units were ganged as a pod to create a net 10MW facility.
While in the past our entries have been somewhat skeptical of Raser’s ability to get plants designed and implemented, we want to provide credit where is due. With the resource showing much larger size than initially scoped at 230MWe of potential, Raser could be a long-term and productive entrant in the geothermal and renewable energy generation field.
Once final commission occurs in the next few weeks, the power generated will be consumed by the City of Anaheim.
BLM Auction Raises $28.2M
In yet another record sale, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned 35 parcels yesterday accounting for 105,311 acres raising a total of $28.2M. This is up from last year’s record of $11.7M on 122,000 acres. Results of the sale are available at the BLM website.
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BLM Lease Sale Aug 5
The Bureau of Land Management is hosting another geothermal auction in Reno August 5th. This time there are 35 parcels totaling 105,311 acres available for intrepid entrepreneurs to bid on and attempt to win. If you’re in the market, good luck! We expect that the money will be big this time around…
Link: Nevada BLM Auction Info
EGS Funding Opportunity Announcement
The US Department of Energy (DoE) will host a conference call at 10am EDT on July 25th to discuss the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) Research, Development, and Demonstration.
The session will be comprised of an overview of the FOA by DoE staff followed by a question and answer period. The catch is that live questions will not be accepted on the teleconference, these questions must be submitted in advance via this web form no later than 12pm EDT on July 24th.
The FOA itself consists of two topic areas; Component Technologies R&D and System Demonstrations. For the R&D topic, the DoE seeks projects that address key aspects of engineered reservoir creation, management, and utilization by developing tools and techniques including zonal isolation, downhole pumps, fracture characterization, imaging fluid flow, tracers and tracer interpretation, high-temperature logging tools/sensors, and stimulation prediction models. The total funding for this area is $40M with a ceiling of $5M per award and no minimum. The award will take the form of a grant or cooperative agreement.
For the Demonstrations topic, the DoE seeks projects to characterize a geothermal system with low natural productivity, develop a plan to stimulate the productivity of the system, stimulate a well in the system and monitor the productivity or injectivity of the well in relation to other wells available in the system with the goal of increasing productivity or inter-well connectivity. The total funding for this area is $50M with a ceiling of $15M per award with no minimum. The award will be in the form of a cooperative agreement where at least 20% of the total project expense will be funded by non-government sources.
Call Logistics:
Dial-in: 888-391-6568
Passcode: 61564
Applications for the FOA itself are due by 11:59pm EDT on August 12, 2008.
Geothermal Energy Utilization Conference
June 17-18, 2008, the SMU Geothermal Laboratory will host the Geothermal Utilization Conference focusing on co-production in the petrochemical and electricity generation fields along with EGS. Since petrochemical fields tend to be pressurized, full of water, and hot, it is only natural that secondary harvest of electricity is possible.
Details about the conference are available here.
