Jan
22
The Missing Geothermal Technology
January 22, 2010 | 9 Comments
Regular readers might recall this writer isn’t wedded to only using fluids for circulating into geothermal reservoirs. A link sent by a reader led to a fellow well on the way to having a ground source geothermal system that transfers energy with air instead of water, antifreeze or other fluids. Its an air to air [...]
Dec
15
The Case For More Geothermal Power
December 15, 2009 | 1 Comment
Research, discovery, creativity and innovation have a way of coming forward with seemingly high user costs that come down as ideas grow into larger markets. A prime example is wind power that we’ve seen grow from nearly invisible to forests of wind turbines across swaths of North America. Many wonder what is so slow about [...]
Sep
17
A Way to Get Very Deep Geothermal Drilling
September 17, 2009 | 3 Comments
Researchers at ETH Zurich are using heated oxygen, ethanol and water pumped into their reactor burner through various pipelines and valves and mix them under temperature and pressure conditions, which correspond to the supercritical state of water (see illustration below) in an effort to get to energy rich deep geothermal rock. The researchers observe the [...]
Sep
8
AltaRock Loses Its Geothermal Hole
September 8, 2009 | 1 Comment
AltaRock Energy, the company pursuing an advanced geothermal energy technology has had to suspend its first attempt to drill a deep well in Northern California. The effort was funded by Google and venture capital company Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with partial funding by a Department of Energy grant. Some part of the $17 million [...]
Jul
20
A New Geothermal Heat Extraction Method
July 20, 2009 | 1 Comment
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will determine this year if their innovative approach can safely and economically extract and convert heat from vast untapped geothermal resources. PNNL’s Laboratory Fellow Pete McGrail says, “By the end of the calendar year, we plan to have a functioning bench-top prototype generating electricity. If [...]
Jun
11
A New Way to Drill For Geothermal Energy
June 11, 2009 | 3 Comments
Potter Drilling has launched the next phase of research into their technique for drilling to hot rock for geothermal heat energy. With financial backing from Google getting the science past early work using air, Potter has crossed the development threshold to draw more funding.
The new drilling technique that uses superheated steam instead of air is [...]
Mar
4
A Look at The World’s Geothermal Conference
March 4, 2009 | 1 Comment
Today the world sees the leading geothermal work coming from Iceland with better than 500 MW online and Germany with over 100GW. The U.S. has Chevron and Raser, but Chevron is mostly offshore and Raser is essentially new, but gaining online connections at a rapid pace. What Raser has, and will put up isn’t clear, [...]
Sep
17
Checking Up On Low Temperature Geothermal By Raser and United Technologies
September 17, 2008 | 2 Comments
Raser Technologies, a publicly traded (NYSE Arca: RZ) Utah company involved in low temperature geothermal installations and alternating current electric motors is back in the press release business. With a stock price of about $5.50 ranging from $4 to over $18 in the past year the company has the volatility to be interesting.
Barely a year [...]
Sep
2
Geothermal Reality Check
September 2, 2008 | 1 Comment
The MIT report that discusses and maps the U.S. geothermal potential (a large pdf file) may be a seminal work that still needs attention. The problem might be the scenario, pumping water down multiple wells to deep hot rocks and bringing it back heated for conversion to power. Most people expect that the water coming [...]
Jul
29
A Compressed Air Energy Storage Reality Check
July 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
A guest author going by Libelle posted a piece titled “Compressed Air Energy Storage – How Viable Is It?” Sunday at TheOilDrum, Canada. It’s a top-flight review of the physics and explains the thermodynamics in a quaint, easy to grasp way.
Libelle suggests that raising the elevation of water might be more effective. From here on [...]
