Posted on 12/12/2009 1:11:29 PM PST by reaganaut1
The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.
The project by the company, AltaRock Energy, was the Obama administration’s first major test of geothermal energy as a significant alternative to fossil fuels and the project was being financed with federal Department of Energy money at a site about 100 miles north of San Francisco called the Geysers.
But on Friday, the Energy Department said that AltaRock had given notice this week that “it will not be continuing work at the Geysers” as part of the agency’s geothermal development program.
The project’s apparent collapse comes a day after Swiss government officials permanently shut down a similar project in Basel, because of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007. Taken together, the two setbacks could change the direction of the Obama administration’s geothermal program, which had raised hopes that the earth’s bedrock could be quickly tapped as a clean and almost limitless energy source.
The Energy Department referred other questions about the project’s shutdown to AltaRock, a startup company based in Seattle. Reached by telephone, the company’s chief operations officer, James T. Turner, confirmed that the rig had been removed but said he had not been informed of the notice that the company had given the government. Two other senior company officials did not respond to requests for comment [...]
...
Geothermal enthusiasts asserted that drilling miles into hard rock, as required by the technique, could be done quickly and economically with small improvements in existing methods, Professor Schrag said. “What we’ve discovered is that it’s harder to make those improvements than some people believed,” he added.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And right near San Francisco... If it ever makes the news, it ought to be good for reforming a few SF liberals.
Which I consider myself as one, as well as a oil, gas and nuke enthusiast. However, one must have certain conditions for the development of geothermal resources such as a relatively shallow heat source and controllable water chemistry. It is not the cure all.
The SF location was particularly ironic!
OK, this technology (see link below) is 30 years old and for me in Ohio costs about $300 per year - total heating and cooling. Oh, but Democrats and/or Al Gore don’t get rich from selling this kind of geothermal. I understand.
http://www.waterfurnace.com/residential.aspx
What you are describing is a form of a heat pump/heat exchange mechanism. This is far too cool to use to generate commercial electricity. What was being targeted by this firm is high temperature material.. Commercial geothermal plants need steam to drive turbines similar to a coal or nuke plant. Picture Yellowstone Park for the heat. These geothermal waters, however, are often very corrosive to metals. They commonly contain dissolved metal concentrations that exceed EPA standards for release to the surface and must be reinjected (with associated corrosion and mineral deposit maintenance problems).
The rig pictured on the article web page is capable of drilling for oil but it is fairly light duty and can't go very deep. It is particularly telling that caprock formations were causing problems. It is likely there were more problems than are revealed in the article.
What happened to that wind turbine? Did the birds and bats finally decide to strike back?
Seismic activity near a geothermal site? Whoda thunk it? /s
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Maps/US2/38.40.-124.-122.php
That swarm of blue and yellow squares is “the geysers”
Socialism cannot give us “sustainable” anything except perpetual hype and hope, for economist Ludwig von Mises showed in several articles and papers that socialists cannot compute. More correctly, since socialism as an economic system distorts economic information, it cannot know how to economically allocate finite resources. As a result it allocates resources based on political or ideological criteria.
Thus, we see that in a time of record government budget deficits, it is just as important to spend money to maintain the GPS satellite system as it is to spend $54 million on a tourist train in California's wine country, and spending $2.2 million to improve the warehouse owned by the state of Montana's liquor agency.
We can bolster the economy by taking money from families (with a median income of $50,233) and use it to create one federal job (average salary $70+k). When we have to consume the entire earnings of more than one family to create a single job, we are running as fast as we can to national bankruptcy.
We can only keep up this foolishness as long as people are willing to lend us the money to do it. Then our only recourse is to destroy the value of that debt via hyper-inflation so we can avoid becoming insolvent.
If we don't throw these bums out and quick, our ship is going to sink right out from under us. If these bums think that destroying the current system is their path to power so we would allow them to fix it with a new socialist utopia, we are going to have to start measuring our answer in grains, like in 180 grain units.
Please read: Economic Calculation In The Socialist Commonwealth By Ludwig von Mises
Postscript: Why a Socialist Economy is "Impossible" by Joseph T. Salerno
both are found at www.mises.org
Google: socialist calculation debate
If it was cheap or easy, you can bet it would have been done before. That’s a point that’s completely lost on the greenies.
/s
IIRC...the turbine’s governor failed and it “over-revved” during a windstorm, which tore off or damaged the blades.
Yep. Nothing like what I am used to (rated for 20,000 ft.).
Doubtful. And the petroleum and service companies generally know how to drill in rock without snapping bits off.
Precisely. One look at the rig, and maybe they can drill water wells with it in soft sediments, but it does not look very substantial for drilling even well consolidated sedimentary rock.
Workover rigs around here (Williston Basin) are much more substantial.
It looks like whoever tried to do this underengineered the project.
The new, high penetration rate developments I have seen involve using mud motors (which would likely require a lot more pump than they have) and a more substantial drill string as well.
Performance has never been cheap.
I won't speculate on other possibilities, but as far as drilling a hole in rock, the oil industry is the place to go for answers.
OK.
bump & a ping
Thanks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.