Geothermal Productivity Work

The problem with geothermal is quite simple. It is the oil business without the flush production that immediately recaptures your capital. What is described here is totally predictable and the only way to advance the technology.

What it really means though is that long after the last drop of oil is pumped, Schlumberger and Halliburton will still be fracing geothermal wells. That often can and in this case will cost as much as the original well cost.

Look at how hot those rocks are at merely 6000 feet. In today’s world that is almost shallow drilling. Hydraulic fracturing combined with a fracing sand that can help keep the fractures open should create a huge pool of accessible heat. Getting water back into the heat pool is a necessity. That is why we are still learning.

The Basin and Range region has a vast reservoir of shallow hot rocks. These are plausibly remnants of the super volcano forming Yellowstone passing through.

Making Geothermal More Productive

http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Making_Geothermal_More_Productive_999.html

by Staff Writers

Salt Lake City UT (SPX) Sep 11, 2009

University of Utah researchers will inject cool water and pressurized water into a "dry" geothermal well during a five-year, $10.2 million study aimed at boosting the productivity of geothermal power plants and making them feasible nationwide.

"Using these techniques to increase pathways in the rock for hot water and steam would increase availability of geothermal energy across the country," says geologist Ray Levey, director of the Energy and Geoscience Institute (EGI), which is part of the university's College of Engineering.

EGI geologist Joe Moore - who will head the research effort at U.S. Geothermal Inc.'s Raft River power plant in southeast Idaho - says most geothermal power in the United States now is produced west of the Rocky Mountains, where hot rocks are found closest to the surface.

"Hot rock is present across the United States, but new methods have to be developed to use the heat in these rocks to produce geothermal power," says Moore. "We want to use oil and gas industry techniques to create pathways in the rock so that we can use the heat in the rocks to generate electricity."

"There's incredible potential in Utah and other states for geothermal development," he adds. "Engineered geothermal systems [in which water is injected to enhance natural cracks in the rock] could provide a means of developing these resources much faster."

The U.S. Department of Energy on Sept. 4 signed an agreement with the University of Utah and EGI to pay almost $7.4 million of the project's cost.

The University of Utah is providing $1.1 million through the Office of the Vice President for Research. Another $1.7 million will be provided by discounts or cash or in-kind donations by two of EGI's partners in the project: U.S. Geothermal, Inc. of Boise, and Apex HiPoint, LLC, of Littleton, Colo.

Moore says the university's contribution will help fund involvement of graduate and undergraduate students from the College of Engineering and College of Mines and Earth Sciences.

Experiment at Raft River

"We're going to take a geothermal field and improve its productivity," Moore says. "We're going to test the techniques on one well at Raft River. We're testing methods to take wells that are not productive and make them productive."

Moore says the Department of Energy did geothermal research for three decades at the site, located 11 miles from Interstate 84 in southeast Idaho halfway between Boise and Salt Lake City. Raft River is now a U.S. Geothermal power plant producing 10.5 to 11.5 megawatts of electricity - enough for roughly 10,000 homes. The power is sold to Idaho Power Co.

Some estimate the site may be capable of producing 110 megawatts of power. Researchers believe production can be increased because underground temperatures measure 275 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit at depths of 4,500 to 6,000 feet.

The Raft River plant currently has five "production" wells that produce geothermal energy and four "injection" wells where water from the production wells is returned to the underground geothermal reservoir. Water must be re-injected to maintain pressure in a geothermal power system.

One well drilled in recent years did not produce enough hot water to be used as a production well because it did not connect with enough of the underground cracks that carry the hot water.

"Geothermal wells are like oil wells - some wells produce and some don't," Moore says. "Drilling wells is expensive. That is why we need to develop low-cost techniques to improve their productivity."

If the experiments run by EGI work, U.S. Geothermal eventually will operate the test well and put it into service.

Stimulating Geothermal Power by Cracking Hot Rock

To produce geothermal power, hot rock is not enough. The rock also must be permeable to the flow of water and-or steam, says John McLennan, an engineer at EGI. Many geothermal reservoirs have heat, but the rock is impermeable, which is the problem at the Raft River well known as RRG-9.

The experiment will try to make RRG-9 into an effective injection well because U.S. Geothermal must inject more water into the ground to increase the productivity of its existing production wells. Moore says all the water-injection "stimulations" will be done during 2010, with the well monitored over the rest of the five-year study period. All the water will come from production wells, not from streams.

Researchers will first let cold water flow into the hot rocks around the 6,000-foot-deep well, hoping to crack them extensively, and then pump water into the ground under high pressures to force the cracks to open wider. The goal of this "hydraulic stimulation" is to create a network of underground conduits that connect the well with underground cracks that already carry hot water.

"When the cold water reaches the hot rock it will crackle," Moore says. "Stimulation is the process of generating new cracks."

Apex Petroleum Engineering, Inc. of Englewood, Colo., will help design the water injection operations to create "hydraulic fractures." Apex HiPoint's monitoring equipment will listen to microseismic activity in the rural area to determine the extent of the cracking and thus the growth of the underground geothermal reservoir. Groundwater flow and pressures will be monitored.

Moore says three "stimulations" will occur. During the first two, relatively cool water (40 to 135 degrees Fahrenheit) will flow into the well to crack the rock at a depth of 6,000 feet. Then, a third "stimulation" will involve pumping large volumes of water into the well at high pressure to expand the cracks and keep them open to the flow of water and steam.

The lower half of the well is uncased by piping. The researchers will insert more piping so that the injected water will flow to the depths where it is needed.

McLennan says semi-sized trucks carrying large pumps will come to the well site and may pump as much as 4,200 gallons of water per minute into the ground during each "stimulation." The total amount injected "could be on the order of 1 million gallons" for each of three "stimulations," he adds.

The goal, says Moore, is "to create a complex fracture network over an extensive area."

The Department of Energy wants to develop methods that can "stimulate" geothermal production in various geological environments with various rock types, Moore says. If the techniques used at Raft River prove effective, they could be used anywhere rock is hot.

"It will definitely be an advantage to Raft River if they can improve the productivity of the well, but the Department of Energy is funding this as a research program because hot rock exists everywhere," Moore says.

The Energy and Geoscience Institute is a contract research organization. Levey says that in terms of the number of participating companies, EGI is the largest university-based research consortium working with the energy exploration and production industry.

In addition to their positions at EGI, Levey and Moore are research professors of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Utah, and McLennan is a research professor of chemical engineering and civil and environmental engineering.

Cold Fusion Vindication Heralded

This article is beating the cold fusion drum a little more loudly in light of the recent news that we posted a few days ago.

Fleishman and Pons were debunked unmercifully in North America and it was wrong. A scientist must be allowed to become enthusiastic when a new line of research proves enticing. Their curious results, however interpreted, have since triggered thousands of hours of good scientific lab work that needed to be done.

We are obviously gaining on the problem and we are possibly inching toward a working device that can be used.

Rather more importantly, we are slowly succeeding in the task of seeing the related particles and this leads to opportunities to do clever things.

Cold fusion when announced revealed our profound ignorance regarding atomic structure and more pertinently the nature of atomic curvature in and about the atom. All this plays a part in any prospective reaction. Cold fusion was the apple falling from the tree that signaled the need to take a long hard look.

Research Vindicates Cold Fusion
Cold Fusion Proven True by U.S. Navy Researchers - by Mike Adams, NaturalNews
Editor

http://www.westender.com.au/news/466

(NaturalNews) The world owes Fleischmann and Pons a huge apology: The cold fusion technology they announced in 1989 -- which was blasted by arrogant hot fusion scientists as a fraud -- has been proven true once again by U.S. Navy Researchers. In papers presented at this year's American Chemical Society meeting, scientist Pamela Mosier-Boss presented data supporting the reality of cold fusion, declaring the report, "the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons from low-energy nuclear reactions."

Technically, it's not the first report at all, however. It might be the five-hundredth report, given how many people have been working on cold fusion since 1989 in laboratories across the world. Following the politically-motivated assassination of cold fusion credibility in 1989, the cold fusion movement went underground, renaming itself to LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions). As LENR, cold fusion has been proven true in literally thousands of experiments conducted over the past two decades.

I first went public with the true story about the conspiracy against cold fusion in 1998. It described this classic conspiracy against a new technology, schemed up by desperate defenders of old technology -- hot fusion researchers who, after hundreds of billions of dollars in research money, have yet to produce a single sustainable hot fusion reaction that produces more energy than it consumes. The arrogant hot fusion researchers have the same snooty attitude as cancer researchers: "Just give us another billion dollars," they say, "and we'll find a cure!"

It's been the same story for nearly three decades now, and hot fusion still doesn't work. A working cold fusion unit, however, can be built on a kitchen countertop for less than $2,000, and it doesn't require a doctorate in physics to pull it off, either. It is precisely this simplicity that offends the arrogant hot fusion pushers who act much like medical doctors in the vicious defense of their territory.

Cold fusion applications

Cold fusion isn't some magical free energy machine. It produces excess heat, but slowly. So don't go thinking this is some kind of Mr. Fusion device that you can feed some banana peels and expect to get clean electricity out the other end.

Rather, cold fusion converts mass to heat energy, slowly losing a bit of mass through very low-energy nuclear reactions (hence the LENR name) that generate excess heat. In practical terms, cold fusion produces hot water.

And why is hot water useful? Because with hot water, you can produce steam. Steam turns turbines that generate electricity. This is how coal power plants work, too, except they're burning coal to heat water instead of using cold fusion. Conventional nuke plants work the same way, too, using much higher-energy nuclear reactions to heat vast amounts of water that drive electricity-generating turbines.

So heating water with cold fusion is a big deal. If the technology can be scaled up and applied properly, it could spell an end to the era of dirty coal power plants.

And that, friends, could mean a very big deal for reducing CO2 emissions and avoiding a worsening of global warming. It will even help global warming skeptics, too, because even if you don't believe global warming is real, the climate still changes on you. Mother Nature can't be debated. It just reacts.

Whether you recognize the reality of global warming or not, cold fusion technology could reduce air pollution due to coal power plant emissions. Coal power plants are the No. 1 source of mercury pollution on our planet, in case you didn't know. That's because burning coal spews mercury into the air, which then contaminates oceans and land masses, contaminating the world with mercury.

(Perhaps there are mercury skeptics who do not believe coal power plants spew mercury at all, or that mercury is safe for human consumption. The mercury skeptics are probably dentists, come to think of it...)

No radioactive waste

Cold fusion, by the way, does not produce radioactive waste. So it's not like a world full of cold fusion power plants would create yet another radioactive waste problem. It might cause a shortage of palladium, though, which is one of the metals typically used in cold fusion devices.

Some of the more astute readers of this website will probably figure out that investing in palladium futures ahead of any widespread production of cold fusion devices would no doubt be extremely profitable. But that kind of product rollout is likely years away, at best.

And that's assuming that this latest round of cold fusion announcements won't get clobbered yet again by the hot fusion conspirators. I'm half expecting an updated news announcement in a day or two, with a headline like, "U.S. Navy Retracts Cold Fusion Announcement, Scientists Accused of Fraud" or some such nonsense. If you see such a headline, remember what you're reading here, and you'll know it's all been manipulated to erase the reality of cold fusion from the sphere of public knowledge.

Cold fusion, after all, could revolutionize the energy industry and spell doom for coal and natural gas. I know a bunch of executives in Wyoming who are shaking in their (insulated) boots right now at the thought of cold fusion sidelining natural gas.

Authors' Quotes on Cold Fusion

Below, you'll find selected quotes from noted authors on the subject of Cold Fusion. Feel free to quote these in your own work provided you give proper credit to both the original author quoted here and this NaturalNews page.

Nowhere are the resistance to and promise of a new energy technology more dramatically revealed than those of the case of cold fusion. This well-researched approach has the potential of reversing much of the pollution while turning the interests of the energy monopolies upside down. Unfortunately, even the environmentalists haven't yet given new energy alternatives a fair look. The cold fusion Revolution: The unfolding cold fusion saga has provided us with an illustrious thirteen year history that would make the suppression of Tesla seem like a school exercise.

- Reinheriting the Earth: Awakening to Sustainable Solutions and Greater Truths by Brian O'Leary - Available on Amazon.com

The coup de grace was delivered to cold fusion when the US House committee formed to examine the claims for cold fusion came down on the side of the skeptics. 'Evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive,' said its report. 'No special programmes to establish cold fusion research centers or to support new efforts to find cold fusion are justified.'

- Alternative Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment by Richard Milton - Available on Amazon.com

Cold fusion The fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium at room temperature. In 1989 two scientists announced that they had produced cold fusion in their laboratory, an achievement that if true would have meant a virtually unlimited cheap energy supply for humanity. When other scientists were unable to reproduce their results, the scientific community concluded that the original experiment had been flawed.

- The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E. D. Hirsch, Joseph F. Kett, James Trefil - Available on Amazon.com

Thus within two months of its original announcement, cold fusion had been dealt a fatal blow by two of the world's most prestigious nuclear research centres, each receiving millions of pounds a year to fund atomic research. The measure of MIT's success in killing off cold fusion is that still today, the US Department of Energy refuses to fund any research into it while the US Patent Office relies on the MIT report to refuse any patents based on or relating to cold fusion processes even though hundreds have been submitted.

- Alternative Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment by Richard Milton - Available on Amazon.com

Patent Office of any application mentioning cold fusion; 3) Suppression of research on the phenomenon in government laboratories; 4) Citation of cold fusion as "pathological science" or "fraud" in numerous books and articles critical of cold fusion in general, and of Fleischmann and Pons in particular." One of the DOE panel members, Prof. Steven Koonin of Caltech (and now Provost there), said, "My conclusion is that the experiments are just wrong and that we are suffering from the incompetence and delusion of Doctors Pons and Fleischmann...

- Reinheriting the Earth: Awakening to Sustainable Solutions and Greater Truths by Brian O'Leary - Available on Amazon.com

Six months after cold fusion was announced, the American Department of Energy denounced it. In Japan, the people who are considered authorities blindly emulated the attitude of the Americans, as they invariably do, and they too pontificated against cold fusion. Perhaps it was inevitable that most people would assume the claims are cock and bull nonsense. In keeping with the tide of the times, countless books and articles have been published attacking cold fusion. The very act of researching cold fusion has become scandalous.

- Alternative Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment by Richard Milton - Available on Amazon.com

Equally illuminating were the remarks of Professor John Huizenga, who was co-chairman of the US Department of Energy's panel on cold fusion and who came down against the reality of the process. In a recent book on the subject, Professor Huizenga observed that 'The world's scientific institutions have probably now squandered between $50 and $100 million on an idea that was absurd to begin with.' The question is, what were his principal reasons for rejecting cold fusion.

- Alternative Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment by Richard Milton - Available on Amazon.com

This was perhaps the high-water mark of cold fusion. Scores of organisations over the world were actively working to replicate cold fusion in their laboratories, and although many reported difficulties a decent number reported success. And by the end of April, Fleischmann and Pons were standing before the US House Science, Space and Technology committee asking for a cool $25 million to fund a centre for cold fusion research at Utah University. Then things began to go wrong.