Geothermal Energy

James L Bradley January 2012

http://old.pnsn.org/WEBICORDER/BETTER/pnsn_staweb/index.html

Were at it again, scratching the back of planet Earth, praying it isnt ticklish and jump around too much. It appears that AltaRock Energy of Seattle and Davenport Newberry Holdings of Stamford, CT are getting set to pump some 24-million gallons (99.6 tons) of water down a 10,000 foot hole they drilled in the side of what is labeled a dormant volcano near Bend, Oregon. This injection of water they hope will shoot back up another hole as steam or hot water powerful enough to drive turbines that will product copious amount of electricity. The volcano, the massive Newberry Volcano is a large potentially active shield super-volcano that is 20 miles in diameter and has a approximate volume of 80 cubic miles, picture it a block of lave or stuff some 80 miles square, shooting out basaltic, andesitic and rhyolitic lava. The Newberry Caldera itself is 4 miles by 5 miles in approximate diameter, inside of which are two lakes Paulina and East Lake, and also inside the caldera are many pyroclastic cones, lava flows and obsidian domes. It sits at the end of a 29-mile long series of fractures called the Brothers Fracture Zone (BFC), where 6100 years ago it ruptured and basalt flows shot from the rupture and covered the volcanos northwest flank. Now as far a volume is concerned I dont really believe that 24-million gallons of water will create an eruption, of course Im not a volcanologist, and I could be wrong. If I am the people living some 20-miles northwest in Bend are going to have an exciting time.

Looking at the map, the Newberry Volcano is that little black triangle just to the left of that red circle labeled NC, which if you follow the light blue lines they represent the hot spot that comes to an end before the red circle marked MC, the light blue lines date back some 16-million years of High Lave Plains in Oregon of high-density volcanism this track and its implication of a moving source, roughly mirrors the similar track of the Yellowstone Hotspot from the McDermitt Caldera on the Oregon-Nevada border. This has solidified the reason behind the reasoning that the Newberry Volcanic Complex was also created by a hotspot releasing material from the mantle, but unlike the Yellowstone Hotspot being an indication of the North American Plate moving across the Yellowstone Hotspot, the Newberry Hotspot moves west instead of east, and although the age of the regional volcanism is dated around 16 million years ago it is a date that is debated, the activity of drilling holes and injecting H 2O and various chemicals is none-the-less worrisome to a few geologists. Their main worry being that the Newberry Complex reflects a pre-existing weakness in the earths crust, and adding the water (a lubricant) might trigger small earthquakes, and later large ones cracking open the vents in the mantle associated with the Brothers Fault Zone.

According to the latest Oregon Public Broadcasting (1-24-2012) news release on the project Doctor Stuart Garrett in looking closely at the projects environmental assessment discovered a list of chemical agents the plan calls to be injected along with the water, the report not real

forthcoming he asked the BLM for more information about these chemicals and the risks they might pose to human health. He remarked, Im concerned that there hasnt been full disclosure. There hasnt been transparency here. And I think people in Central Oregon having to deal with the potential effects of the drilling need to be fully informed. President Susan Petty of AltaRock Energy said, the company has deliberately chosen chemical agents that are not toxic, besides the chemicals would be used in very minute quantities far below the groundwater table and precautions would be taken to avoid any leakage. The Newberrys shield has one of the largest collections of cinder cones, domes, lava flows, and fissures in the World, so many that the locals call the parasitic vents Paulina Mountains, thinking them as a separate mountain range. Most of the cinder cones are 200 to 400 feet high and have shallow saucer-shaped summit craters, and are typically surrounded by basalt or andesite that erupted from their bases forming large lava beds. The northern flank has three lava tube systems that formed in smooth unbroken lava or basaltic lava that has a smooth, billowy, undulating, or ropy surface technically they are called Pahoehoes so named by Clarence Dutton. The Horse Lave Tube System is a series of lava tubes within Deschutes County, beginning within the Deschutes National Forest on the northern flank of Newberry Volcano and heads north into and near Bend, it then continues north again to Redmond at the Redmond Caves and into the Redmond Canyon, where the last known segment is known to exist, however the basalt flow that created the Horse System flows beyond to the Crooked River Ranch almost 50-miles north of its beginning. The Arnold Lava Tube System consists of a series of nineteen lava tubes, as the Horse System they began on the northern flank of the Newberry Volcano and head northeast onto BLM land before terminating near Horse Ridge the system has found to be the conduit for the lava flow from Lava Top Butte which is one of the more than four-hundred (400) late Pleistocene to early Holocene cinder cones located on the flanks of the Newberry Volcano. The Lava Top Butte Caves of which four of the eighteen lava tubes (caves) show evidence of pre-historic occupation, the tubes range in length from a few feet to over 200 feet and include two

perennial ice caves, which as dry as the climate is must have been a valuable year-round water source, to the indigenous inhabitants. Located west of US Highway 97 between Bend and Sunriver is Lava Butte, a 5,020 foot cinder cone, that like other cinder cones in the area is believed to have experience only a single eruption dating back some 7,000 years. This eruption began as a fissure of the massive Newberry Volcano shooting hot cinders high in the air, next phase being the spewing forth of hot basalt that flowed from the base of the small volcano to cover a large area, note in the snap on the previous page that very little vegetation is found on its western slopes the lava flow reached the Deschutes River about 2.5 miles west of the cone, burying its former channel with a little under 100 feet of lava, damming the river which formed what was known as Lake Benham. Over time the river overflowed the lava dam, eventually eroding it away draining the lake and forming Benham Falls.

Renewable energy, albeit has been sort of held back because of cheap gas, and a flat demand across the USA for power along with the lack of political concern over Global Warming, pushes forward with wind and solar power technologies that are inefficient and sporadic this leaves as a possible constant source Geothermal Energy. But in itself it too has its technical problems and a crowd that concerns themselves over the possibility of earthquakes, especially in regions such as the Newberry Volcano that has faults, and rifts crisscrossing the land more than one can count. Despite this, like the Belo Monte Complex in Brazil, the demand for power is not going to diminish, and our natural gas supply is not forever, and coal is about as popular as a drug house on your street. Our civilization has used heat from the earths crust to generate power for more than a century, where engineers tap the hot water or steam to drive turbines that create electricity, a good

example would be Iceland which has tapped it for years to supply the majority (81%) of its electricity. Where most of those close-to-the-surface exposed vents have been exploited, now the new frontier is locating places that have hot rocks, although there are no cracks or fissures in the earth to deliver the steam. Moving forward the Geothermal industry is now pushing a new technology labeled Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS)where the system does NOT required natural convective hydrothermal resources. The new EGS technologies enhance or create geothermal resources in what they call hot dry rock (HDR) by the use of hydraulic stimulation. When the natural cracks and pores do NOT allow economic flow rates (lots of pressure), the belief is that this can be increased by pumping high-pressure cold water down an injection well into the HDR, in this the injection increases the fluid pressure in the naturally fractured rock, creating shear events (further cracking the rocks) that increase the system economic flow. The process is termed hydro-shearing, which by the way is different than the hydraulic tensile fracturing utilized in the oil and gas industries, where instead of water the hydraulic tensile pumps in diesel and some highly toxic chemicals. The concept calls for the pressurized water to travel through the fractures in the rock, being heated by the HDR, until it is forced out of a second borehole as very hot pressurized water, the waters heat is converted to electricity using a steam turbine or a binary power plant system. The cooled water is injected back into the ground to make the roundtrip again, in effect a closed loop system. By-the-way the closed loop system in order to be effective will require a large reservoir constructed near by. The developers at Newberry Volcano, AltaRock, plan on demonstrating a new technology for creating bigger reservoirs made from the same plastic polymers used to make bio-degradable cups whereas the synthetic has been shown to work in existing geothermal field, which require less water than the standard binary power EGS plants. The geothermal industry touts the fact that EGS technology can be utilized anywhere in the world where there are hot rocks, economically its use depends on the depth of the drill hole and if the project is NOT to near faults and known rift zones, active or inactive. Theoretically a developer will search for a location that does not require more than a 1.9 to 3.1 mile hole, and one that has a fairly good sediment layer acting as an insulator that will slow heat loss. The industry

has advertised that a typical installation will have a useful life of 20-to-30 years before the heated water from the mantel drops below 18F, they also state that if a plant is left dormant for 50-to300 years the temperature will recover. Who is going to maintain a closed plant for 50-to-300 years you got it, no-one. They will pack their bags and move to the next operation and maybe come back when the temperature rises. In a report by MIT in 2006 (funded by the US DOE), which was chaired by Jefferson Tester, reached several significant conclusions referring to EGS. 1) It calculated that the total EGS resources in the United States (places they could tap within the window of depth) would be capable of producing 13,000 zettajoules (ZJ) of energy, of which 200 ZJ would be easily extracted. A zettajoule is the power of ten raised 21 times, a 10 followed by 21 zeros, currently the total energy consumption around the globe is 0.5 zettajoules. The 18member committee at MIT determined the total geothermal resources, equal to approximately 14,000 ZJ or about 140,000X the total US annual primary energy use in 2005 2) With a modest R&D investment of $1 billion over 15-years (approximate cost of one coal fired power facility) they estimated that 100 gigawatts of electricity or more could be installed by 2050 in the US along with this they determined that recoverable resources (accessible with todays technology) to be between 1.2 to- 12.2 terrawatts on the conservative side. 3) They also found that EGS could be capable of producing electricity for as low as $0.039 per kilowatt hour, albeit the cost is determine by: a) Temperature of the resource b) Fluid flow through the system measured in gallons per second c) Drilling costs d) Power conversion efficiency To date the largest geothermal project in the world is being developed in Australias Cooper Basin, a site of an impact crater created around 300 million years ago, which was discovered by Tonguc Uysal in October 2010, and has a minimum diameter of 50 miles. It is one of the largest of Australias 30 to 50 known or suspected craters. This particular project being developed by Geodynamcis has the potential to produce 5-10 gigawatts, along with Geodynamics there are thirty-three firms either, exploring, drilling or developing additions EGS operations. In the basin exploration companies have conducted extensive research to discover if the region is economically viable to power production, in this they have estimated that HDR is available at depth of 2.17 miles beneath the surface with an estimated temperature 464F, as it turns out the Cooper site is predicted to have the hottest rocks in the world at economic drilling depths and

away from volcanoes, yet during reservoir stimulation tests in 2003 induced seismic events were trigger up to a magnitude of 3.7. This summer there will be 24-million gallons of water, mixed with a few harmless chemicals, pumped into the ground on the slopes of the Newberry Volcano, a volcano that most claim is a dormant volcano, the hope is that the earth wont object too much and in return advance the cause of green energy so do I, at a price cheaper or comparable to fossil fuel power generation. "The important question we need to answer now," said Williams, the USGS geophysicist who compiled the assessment, "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."