Word: waterous
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...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...
...High power costs and their benefits With partner origin energy, a big Australian oil and gas company, Geodynamics now plans to build enough wells to run a 50-MW commercial power plant by 2011. That feat will need much deeper wells and better water flows. If it works, Geodynamics will build more wells to produce 500 MW - about the output of a modern gas-turbine power plant...
...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...
...before Geodynamics does. Petratherm, with projects in Spain and interests in 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...
...issue for the industry," says Petratherm's managing director, Terry Kallis, "is to prove flow." In other words, can water be pumped out fast and hot enough to drive that turbine on the surface - and keep doing so for decades? "I'm confident Australia will be the first" to achieve this, Kallis says, because "we have the hottest rocks in the world of this type...