Google.org Hot For Geothermal Power  

Google.org has generated plenty of publicity with its recent announcement about investing in geothermal energy companies - Enough geothermal energy to power the globe -- now that's hot!.

Today, as part of our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative, Google.org announced more than $10 million in investments and grants in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) technology. EGS expands the potential of traditional geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. The traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam or hot water. The EGS process, by comparison, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine.

EGS has the potential to provide clean renewable electricity 24/7, at a cost cheaper than coal. The ability to produce electricity from geothermal energy has been thought exclusive to locations such as California and Iceland. However EGS could allow us to harness the heat within the earth almost anywhere. To see see the massive size of the US geothermal resource accessible by EGS, check out our Google Earth layer. For more on EGS, watch [the] video [below], featuring Dr. Steve Chu, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Dr. Jefferson Tester, professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and lead author of a major recent study on EGS.

Our EGS partners to date include:

* AltaRock Energy: $6.25 million investment to develop innovative technologies to achieve significant cost reductions and improved performance in EGS projects
* Potter Drilling: $4 million investment in two tranches, to develop new approaches to lower the cost and expand the range of deep hard rock drilling, a critical element to large-scale deployment of EGS
* Southern Methodist University Geothermal Laboratory: $489,521 grant to improve understanding of the size and distribution of geothermal energy resources and to update geothermal mapping of North America

Working with Geodynamics, one of the world's leading EGS development companies, we modeled Geodynamics' first 50 MW system at the Cooper Basin in SketchUp, Google's 3D modeling technology. To see how EGS works, check out the animation of the SketchUp model or download it.

Australia is sitting on an "inexhaustible" source of energy, scientists say - and they're not talking about coal. "Hot rocks" energy is being touted as the latest solution to climate change. Australia's first hot rocks power station moved a step closer on Wednesday when the federal government launched a $50 million fund to commercialise the technology. Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said Australia's first hot rocks power plant could be built within four years.

USING just 1 per cent of Australia's so-called "hot rocks" supply could produce 26,000 times the amount of energy that is now used each year. The figures, compiled by Geoscience Australia, were such a surprise to the office of the Minister for Resources, Martin Ferguson, that staff had them checked six times before releasing them. "The potential of the geothermal industry in Australia is truly staggering … It provides clean baseload power and is potentially a very important contributor to Australia's energy mix in a carbon-constrained world," Mr Ferguson said.

Geothermal energy could supply as much as 5 percent of Australia's electricity requirements by 2020 with an investment of about A$12 billion ($10.4 billion), helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions, an industry group said.

Producing power from underground heat could provide a maximum of 2,200 megawatts of continuous generating capacity by 2020, the Australian Geothermal Energy Association said today in an e-mailed statement, citing a study by economic modeling firm McLennan Magasanik Associates. That would be up to 40 percent of the nation's 2020 target for renewable energy use.

Geodynamics Ltd. and Petratherm Ltd. are among companies seeking to tap super-hot granites lying as deep as 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) underground in South Australia state to produce low- emissions electricity. Twenty-three companies will invest more than A$701 million in geothermal exploration in the state in 2002-2013, the South Australian government said this month.

``This report highlights that the Australian geothermal energy industry has a potentially significant contribution to solving Australia's long-term climate change challenges,'' Gerry Grove White, chairman of the group, said in the statement.

The cost of generating power from geothermal sources is expected to decline to become the cheapest form of renewable energy by 2020, the study found.