{"id":178,"date":"2007-05-15T08:38:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T15:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/?p=178"},"modified":"2007-05-15T08:38:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-15T15:38:00","slug":"100000mw-of-geothermal-power-by-2050","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/?p=178","title":{"rendered":"100,000MW of Geothermal Power by 2050"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That was the theme of the <a href=\"https:\/\/web.mit.edu\/newsoffice\/2007\/geothermal.html\">MIT report on Geothermal potential<\/a> released earlier this year. 100,000MW of geothermal power would amount to 10% of 2006 levels of US energy production. An interesting question (and perhaps the most salient question) is: What would it take to get to these production levels?<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.blackmountaintechnology.com\/consultants.html\">Susan Petty<\/a>, a consultant for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.blackmountaintechnology.com\/\">Black Mountain Technology<\/a>, started her talk at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.geo-energy.org\/financeWorkshop\/default_ws.asp\">GEA Geothermal Financing workshop<\/a> last week by attempting to answer this question by quantifying what would be required to reach 100,000MW by 2050:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$1B invested in R&#038;D over the next 15 years (as referenced in the MIT report)<\/li>\n<li>Exploration yielding 390 square miles (1,010 sq km) of productive geothermal resource area per year<\/li>\n<li>80 drill rigs operating continuously over the next 40 years, amounting to 10% of the total US rig population<\/li>\n<li>$2 Trillion dollars of development funding to build the plants and transmission infrastructure<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In the year 2050 if all of those things happened, geothermal production areas in aggregate would cover 17,600 square miles (45,000 sq km,) roughly the same area as the states of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_U.S._states_by_area\">Maryland and Connecticut combined<\/a>. Given the current state of geothermal funding, the development costs, and exploration challenges, it is unlikely that 100,000MW of geothermal power will be in production in 2050 &#8211; but, there is no hope of success unless the industry aims for such lofty goals.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s certainly interesting to look backward from the goal like this, thanks Susan for taking the time to share this with the geothermal community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That was the theme of the MIT report on Geothermal potential released earlier this year. 100,000MW of geothermal power would amount to 10% of 2006 levels of US energy production. An interesting question (and perhaps the most salient question) is: What would it take to get to these production levels? Susan Petty, a consultant for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2gI6x-2S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}