Apr

9

What’s Gone Wrong With Geothermal?

April 9, 2010 | 3 Comments

At a site like this what is missing can be very disconcerting.  Missing in total positive content are big geothermal projects. It’s not all bad news. But for one post lets have a look at the problems. The current mainstream technology catch all term is Enhanced Geothermal Systems or EGS. Much of what geothermal is [...]

Jan

22

The Missing Geothermal Technology

January 22, 2010 | 21 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 | 2 Comments

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 | 10 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 | 3 Comments

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 | 4 Comments

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 | 8 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 [...]

Mar

4

A Look at The World’s Geothermal Conference

March 4, 2009 | 3 Comments

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, [...]

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