Pouring Water Into a Volcano To Generate Power 321
Hugh Pickens writes "Until recently, geothermal power systems have exploited only resources where naturally occurring heat, water, and rock permeability are sufficient to allow energy extraction. Now, geothermal energy developers plan use a new technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of the dormant Newberrry Volcano, located about 20 miles south of Bend, Oregon, in an effort to use the earth's heat to generate power. 'We know the heat is there,' says Susan Petty, president of AltaRock Energy, Inc. of Seattle. 'The big issue is can we circulate enough water through the system to make it economic.' Since natural cracks and pores do not allow economic flow rates, the permeability of the volcanic rock can be enhanced with EGS by pumping high-pressure cold water down an injection well into the rock, creating tiny fractures in the rock, a process known as hydroshearing. Then cold water is pumped down production wells into the reservoir, and the steam is drawn out. Natural geothermal resources only account for about 0.3 percent of U.S. electricity production, but a 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology report projected EGS could bump that to 10 percent within 50 years, at prices competitive with fossil-fuels. 'The important question we need to answer now,' says USGS geophysicist Colin Williams, 'is how geothermal fits into the renewable energy picture, and how EGS fits. How much it is going to cost, and how much is available.'"
Not just that (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not throwing the waste there instead of the landfill?
Re:They're going to frack a Volcano? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not just that (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not use the volcano as a heat source for gasification and thermal depolymerisation then?
I heard the same thing about the German V2 (Score:4, Interesting)
There were apparently theories that the upper atmosphere was uncombined hydrogen
and oxygen, and that there was a chance a V2 going high enough would set it off.
Lotta nerve there.
Not again? (Score:4, Interesting)
The results of that review have not yet been announced, but the type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers requires fracturing the bedrock then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam. By its nature, fracturing creates earthquakes [nytimes.com], though most of them are small.
I live near The Geysers, where "treated" sewage water is pumped into the ground in order to keep geothermal production up at the powerplant, which is perpetually over budget and under production, and which has produced a superfund site where they formerly buried the spray-off from the turbine wheels in drums. The turbines are produced by Halliburton — I've seen the red Halliburton truck dragging one up Bottle Rock Rd. on a massive flatbed. Failure all around... the one bright spot is that there is a process for making claims for damage due to the euphemistically-named "microseismicity" [andersonsprings.org] as it is generally accepted that the pumping causes quakes.
Re:yea (Score:5, Interesting)
And no one's gone to the trouble of modeling what happens when you chill down part of a lava dome. Does it harden, then blow sky high? Does it pressure masses underneath the caldera to cause nice earthquakes? Do you get a nice fissure opening up somewhere else to flow the lava into new and vulnerable areas? How long before the solidification means you have drill new spots? How are you going to stabilize the old spots? I don't think there are any lava-eating bacteria to help save the day here. There is nothing we have that's going to repair a newly active caldera. Look at what St Helens did, just a few miles up the road. Talk about playing with matches....
Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
When the person representing the corporation in charge says something like this:
"We know the heat is there," said Susan Petty, president of AltaRock.
"The big issue is can we circulate enough water through the system to make it economic."
And the expert seismologist [scientificamerican.com] says something like this:
We've been monitoring [The Geysers] since 1975.
All the earthquakes we see there are [human] induced.
When they move production into a new area, earthquakes start there, and when they stop production, the earthquakes stop.
Well... You kinda have a reason to fear. [wikipedia.org]
Re:yea (Score:5, Interesting)
And no one's gone to the trouble of modeling what happens when you chill down part of a lava dome. Does it harden, then blow sky high? Does it pressure masses underneath the caldera to cause nice earthquakes? Do you get a nice fissure opening up somewhere else to flow the lava into new and vulnerable areas? How long before the solidification means you have drill new spots? How are you going to stabilize the old spots? I don't think there are any lava-eating bacteria to help save the day here. There is nothing we have that's going to repair a newly active caldera. Look at what St Helens did, just a few miles up the road. Talk about playing with matches....
Are you making the question in the rhetorical sense because you know for a fact that no one is doing just that, or are you asking the question because that is what you are assuming?
Icelanders have some experience (Score:4, Interesting)
During the Westmann Islands eruption, they froze the leading edge of the lava flow to divert it from blocking a harbor. The lava just goes somewhere else.
They estimate that geothermal fields are good for 50-100 years.
Re:Not just that (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, there are very few places in the world (I believe it's seven) where there are exposed, persistent lava lakes. They're very rare. I believe the list is Erta Ale (Ethiopia); Nyiragongo (Congo); Erebus (Antarctica, offshore island) ; Saunders (South Sandwich Islands); Villarrica (Chile); Kilauea (Hawaii); and Marum (Vanuatu). It's one of my dreams to someday climb the volcano on Saunders and see the lava lake at the summit; as far as I am aware, nobody has ever done so (its existence is inferred from the presence of a persistent steam cloud and satellite thermal imaging, but it's a very remote, inhospitable location; to even get there, you have to charter an oceangoing yacht and do a difficult landing in an inflatable boat, timed to the waves, onto rocky cliffs, in the middle of the South Atlantic).
No, drilling into a magma chamber doesn't trigger an eruption. A tiny borehole isn't nearly enough of a weakness (remember also that it's not so much a "hole"; it's a tube full of "mud" with roughly the same density as the surrounding rock, so the pressure is equalized). They accidentally drilled into a magma chamber in Krafla (Iceland) at one point. The magma filled up the bottom couple dozen meters of the bore before semi-solidifying. Not sure what to do, they tried starting injecting water, and it actually worked; they're now producing steam from it and are considering drilling more such holes intentionally (they had previously tried to avoid the magma).