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.

HFR (hot fractured rock) geothermal development company GeoDynamics announced that it has sold 22.3M shares at $1.50 per stub to raise $33.5M (Australian.) Post offering, the company now has 258.9M shares outstanding for a market cap of over $388M (A.) The company continues its development of a 500MW planned HFR project in Australia.

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.

Are Gas Guzzler’s like this headed toward extinction?

Attribution: Sugar Mountain Farms

This morning there are reports that US drivers logged 4.3% fewer miles driven in March than the same period a year ago, that amounts to 11 billion passenger miles. With the average price of gasoline creeping toward $4 a gallon, perhaps the pain is sufficient to cause drivers to reconsider their behaviors, something education and mass transit incentives have failed to do over the past few decades. This is the largest drop in mileage since 1942.

This begs the question: When will pain at the pump start to push non-fossil fuel alternatives to the forefront and which will ultimately win?

Our bet is on electric vehicles with hybrids as a bridge. The reason is the infrastructure exists, one can imagine their parents/grandparents managing to plug-in a vehicle (imagine them managing a hydrogen or massive pressure compressed air fill up…) and biofuels are a bridge, but not an answer yet as the feedstock is expensive and in competition with food.

The outcome will be interesting to see.
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Aerial view of ArcelorMittal Steel Mill

NPR recently posted an in-depth article on bottom-cycling and waste heat recovery in industrial process as a growth area. Featured in the report was the massive ArcelorMittal steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana and its approach to becoming more efficient which includes the installation of boilers above the coke ovens, which generate on the order of 100MWe, or 2,400 MWh per day.

They’ve also taken advantage of pressure differential noticing that the gas that arrives to power their plant is delivered at 30 psi, the pressure at which the gas efficiently burns is 3 psi. So the company has installed turbines inline to harvest the energy in the pressure differential to generate even more power, about 16MWe or 384MWh per day.

The waste heat and gases from the process are also being harvested (bottom cycling) from the exhausted gases yielding a further 65-70MWe. In total, this complex is recovering around 250MWe from its various energy recycling programs offsetting 1,300,000 tons of CO² emissions per year and satisfying nearly 50% of the factories energy needs.

DOE studies suggest US industries waste enough heat to harvest an estimated 200,000MWe from the processes, nearly 20% of total present US generation capacity. Clearly, this is an opportunity for improvement and recovery of existing resources and with energy prices steadily climbing, more of these programs will undoubtably be implemented.

Links:
National Public Radio Report on Energy Recycling