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...aims to be the first to prove that deep-earth geothermal power is commercially viable. Geothermal is already a bit player in the power business: underground water heated by volcanoes is already used for heating and electricity generation in countries like Iceland and New Zealand. But supplies of natural hot water are limited. The new push is to mimic nature by creating artificial water-heating systems using hot subterranean granites. The resource is potentially endless: while each patch of rock will cool as its energy is drawn off, it will heat up again if left alone...
...theory, says Geodynamics chief executive Gerry Grove-White, there's enough heat in the rocks of the Cooper Basin, on which Innamincka sits, to replace all the coal-fired power stations in Australia for more than 250 years. He says one cubic kilometer of hot granite has about the same stored energy as 40 million barrels of oil. With several thousand cubic kilometers of these granites, Australia has enough heat to last millennia...
...surprise, says Grove-White, was that there was no need to add water: it was already there, trapped underground at high pressure for the past 3 million years. Getting the hot water to the surface hasn't been easy, and one well had to be abandoned. But Geodynamics now says the flow from 4 km deep is sufficiently strong and hot to run a 1-MW power station by the end of the year - enough to power the drilling-camp site and Innamincka...
...real trick will be extracting enough hot water to make the 50-MW plant work. If the engineering challenges of great depth and heat can be overcome, the company will follow a cookie-cutter approach and build nine more sets of wells to produce...
...China, already has an agreement to supply 7.5 MW of power to the Beverley uranium mine, 11 km from its drilling site. The company won't go as deep as Geodynamics. Instead, it will try to push its water through 200°C sedimentary rock, just above the hot granites...