Here’s something interesting you may not know: when harvesting oil, there is often “waste water” mixed in the substance coming out of the hole, frequently the water is under pressure and hot. While at the Stanford Geothermal Conference last month, Mark Milliken covered this information during his talk.

Waste Water Discharge at Naval Petroleum Reserve #3


The Naval Petroleum Reserve #3 is really part of the Department of Energy’s Rocky Mountain Oilfield Test Center. As such, it’s not bound by the economic realities of having to produce or else and can experiment a bit with new drilling techniques as well as ponder the question: “what should we do with all this hot water?”

NPR #3’s location in Wyoming


At this particular site, some 6.4 million liters (1.7M gal) of 87°C (190°F) water is discharged per day as part of their oil production. This water is routed into a cooling pond and then released into Little Teapot Dome Creek when the water has cooled sufficiently. Curiously, the amount of oil produced from this activity is around 48,000 liters (12,600 gal) per day. As you can see, far more water is produced per day than oil! The raw power equivalent of this water is estimated to be 22MW, or enough to power some 25,000 homes per year. But, a small fraction of that raw power is available for harvest with existing technologies.

Where does all this hot water come from? The water is hypothesized to come from the Big Horn Mountain range where it soaks into the earth and descends to a series of hot rocks. It then migrates to the Powder River Basin and pours into fissures in Ten Sleep and Madison Limestone layers where it is extracted during petroleum operations. The heat map below will provide some context for how the NPR #3 site fits into the overall estimated heat flow at a 3km depth.

US Heat Map 3km depth


Using binary systems to extract the heat from this water could easily yield a couple of hundred kilowatts in a binary generation scheme. These units need around a 50°C (120°F) difference in temperature between the ambient temperature of production and the resource. It would seem likely that this could be established and maintained at this site and many others. It’s interesting to see this type of exploration underway and it could provide additional benefit (both ecologically and economically) to take advantage of this “free” by-product of an existing activity.


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Technorati Tags: Energy | Geothermal | Oil | Mike Harding Blog

In an attempt to salvage what little network savvy Viacom has shown (see Viacom destroys a $1B business opportunity) they’ve done a deal with Joost. An interesting play to be sure, though Joost is far from a sure thing. I still maintain that Viacom would have been dollars and kilometers ahead simply doing a deal with GooTube, and then doing one with Joost and perhaps Apple. This is starting to remind me of the bad old days of modems where you had to get manufacturer X’s modem to be able to talk to the same modem on the other end.

The modem stuff was a pain for years and couldn’t stand-up in the long term. This is a similar case, in the end, the consumer will win and the content will be freely available period. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. The faster content creators realize they are being paid for what they will create going forward and content controllers realize that volume begets value, the better off it will be for content creators and the shareholders of content controllers.


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Technorati Tags: Viacom | Joost | Media | Mike Harding Blog

Martin Hardee posted an excellent video on this subject yesterday, to make things efficient, I’ve posted it below.



Rarely have I seen such an accurate satire of humans faced with the adoption of new technology. My favorite quote: “Compared to the scroll, it takes longer to turn the pages of a book.” This all boils down to another one of Harding’s Laws: What you know is what you love. I still remember WordStar’s Control-KD to save a document and ESC-q-BANG to exit without saving in vi…Wordperfect was a step backward, Word was a giant leap backward…Ah progess, or our perception of progress. Thanks for the hearty chuckle Martin.



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Technorati Tags: Book or Scroll | Technology | Adoption | Mike Harding Blog

This video gives us a little something to think about on President’s Day. One has to wonder what Washington and Lincoln would make of our current leadership: executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Thus far, I’m entirely underwhelmed with our “new” congressional leadership. Executive leadership has already shown its true colors. The judicial branch might be in the best shape of all, and that’s not saying much.

Alot has been made about mistakes over the past six years. Here’s something to think about: If one is presented a situation and thoroughly considers all of the available information, seeks more context, consults others about the situation and then makes a decision with a negative outcome, it’s a “wrong” decision. The kind of decision I think many people (myself included) can live with, understand, and support.

However, if one is presented a situation and uses only the information that supports a single perspective, dimisses people with understanding, and directs others from a position of ignorance and then simply makes a decision, regardless of the outcome, that is a “bad” decision, also known as, a mistake.

What we’ve seen is a virtually uninterrupted chain of mistakes from our leadership. This is the kind of decision that is lazy, self-serving, dangerous, and damaging. It’s the kind of decision many people (myself included) cannot and will not tolerate.

Here’s to hoping we start seeing a track record of “good” decisions. And if we can’t have that, I’d settle for an increase in “wrong” decisions. But the time of “bad” decisions must quickly fade into the past for all our benefit.


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An airline pilot in Minnesota won the lottery two days in a row…not enough to retire, but if you’re superstitious, lucky enough to make you think he shouldn’t get back into an airplane. The first day odds were 170,000 to 1 on winning. Betcha he goes ice fishing next…


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Technorati Tags: Lottery | Two wins in two days | Mike Harding Blog