Geothermal Power In Utah, The US, & The World Compared With Other Technologies

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I believe in the clean power bible written by Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University. He explains why wind, water, and solar are the only practical and economical means he believes can convert the world efficiently, quickly, and economically to clean energy.

He has eliminated other popular green energy items for the following reasons:

1. Nuclear: Too long to deploy, too expensive, too dangerous (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Ukraine war zone), no way to dispose of high-level radioactive waste (every US nuclear power plant site is a permanent high level nuclear waste storage site, it can’t be done without government disaster insurance) Note: no need to shut down current nukes, but it’s not practical to build new plants in new locations.
2. Biofuel: Ethanol is a good example — it takes about a gallon of fossil fuel to make a gallon of ethanol (its only real use is as a program to subsidize corn farmers)
3. Green Hydrogen: Not an energy source, not energy efficient (standard electrolysis efficiency is only ~33%, but technology is being developed to raise that number. Fuel cells are only 40% to 80% efficient), it’s impossible to transport and store efficiently (with losses in production, transport, storage, and conversion back to electricity, green hydrogen is not attractive).
4. Geothermal: Only possible with the present generation of geothermal power plants in the relatively few regions of the world with hot enough rocks and water close to the surface. But what about the promise of using deeper sources of thermal energy in most locations around the world? I will discuss this later.

A few days ago, we were on our way from our home in northern Utah to our daughter’s home in Saint George in southern Utah. Saint George is only 40 miles from Zion National Park, which in my mind is the most beautiful park in the world. This time of year, it is dusted with snow that looks like powdered sugar, as you see in the photo below.

Our first stop was the Tesla Supercharger in Nephi, Utah. In the photo below, you see our white Tesla Model 3 with bike rack and two Cybertrucks charging at the new 250 kW drive-through charger stalls that are almost full. Normally we don’t charge beyond 80% because it takes so long when the battery gets nearly full. Side trips are difficult because with a bike on the back we have just enough range to easily make the next supercharger.

However, I wanted to do a 15-mile detour to visit the Cove Fort geothermal power plant (see the top photo) 92 miles south, so I charged up to 93%. If you have used your Tesla navigation long enough, you will have found that some of the routes shown don’t actually exist. In this case, when we got just south of the tiny town of Cove Fort the road turned to gravel and then to mud. There were ruts almost a foot deep and it took some skillful driving and some luck not to get stuck. I have dual motors on my Tesla Model 3, but my car has only 4 or 5 inches of clearance. Not a good recipe for traveling on deeply rutted muddy roads.

 

While the geothermal plant is high technology as shown above and in the next figures, the dilapidated house shown in one of the following figures gives you the sense of how rural the location is. Compared to the 1900-megawatt Delta coal power plant, the 25-megawatt Cove Fort power plant is minuscule. We didn’t want to retrace our route on the rutted muddy road so we inquired at the power plant with the sole worker on the best way to continue on our way. He gave us directions on good quality gravel and blacktop roads and told us that plans were in the works to expand the plant to about 100 megawatts. The plant has recently been purchased by Ormat, an Israeli company. Even with this expansion the geothermal power total in Utah will be less than 150 megawatts.

The largest geothermal power plant in the world is the Geysers in California. It is comprised of 15 separate plants with a total output of 1.2 gigawatts. One of them is shown in the figure below.

The US geothermal power production total is only 3.7 gigawatts. US geothermal power plants are only in the western states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Hawaii, Idaho, and Utah. The US total power generation capacity is 1189 gigawatts, so geothermal is only .3% of the US total.

Worldwide, the major geothermal plants are in the US, Italy, Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Iceland. The bottom line is that with current technology, geothermal power is an option in only 10% of the world’s area. After the Geysers in California at 1.2 gigawatts, Cerro Prieto in Mexico is the next biggest geothermal plant at 820 megawatts, with the Larderello geothermal plant in Italy being the third largest at 769 megawatts.

For comparison with other power sources, the largest power plant in the world is at the Three Gorges Dam in China at 22.5 gigawatts. The Baihetan Dam in China is at 16 gigawatts, and the Grand Coulee, the largest in the US, is at 6.8 gigawatts. The largest fossil gas power plant in the world is the Jebel Ali in the UAE at 8.7 gigawatts. The largest nuclear power plant in the world is Kashiwazaki-Kariwa at 8 gigawatts in Japan (no longer in service). The largest onshore wind farm in the world is Jiuquan (Gansu) at 8 gigawatts in China. The largest coal-fired power plant in the world is Tuoketuo in China at 6.7 gigawatts. The largest solar farm in the world is Gonghe Talatan Solar Park in China at 15.6 gigawatts. The largest concentrated solar energy system is Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park at 700 megawatts in the UAE. The largest offshore wind farm in the world is Hornsea 2 in the U.K. at 1.4 gigawatts.

With increasing investments in solar and wind energy, which are not continuous, investments in storage systems to bridge nighttime and calm wind periods have also increased. In terms of energy storage, the world’s largest pumped hydropower system is Fengning in China at 3.6 gigawatts, followed closely by Bath County Virginia at 3 gigawatts in the US. The largest battery energy storage systems are dominated by the US with Edwards Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage Project the largest at 875 megawatts. The Green River Energy Center in Utah will be the largest at 1600 megawatts when completed, most likely by next year.

What is the promise of deeper sources of thermal energy that may possibly be accessed in the future? There have been deep test borings done in Russia to 12,000 meters, and in Iceland to 4600 meters. There have also been discussions of using abandoned oil production wells. This technology would be particularly attractive in the US where oil company prospecting and drilling technology could be employed, which wouldn’t be subject to the terrible anti-clean energy biases of the Trump administration. Bottom line is that this is an attractive technology that could be employed nearly anywhere in the world.

Ironically, only 50 miles southwest of the Cove Fort geothermal plant, near Milford, Utah, the University of Utah — with support of the US Department of Energy — has been conducting the FORGE (Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy) experiment. This is the same site I visited a few weeks ago where a large PV solar farm, a large wind farm, and numerous hog farms are co-located. FORGE has drilled an injection and production hole side by side as shown in the diagram below. Injected water has fractured the rock in between and allowed heated water to be drawn from the production well. The Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) experiment used the two wells drilled through sedimentary rock into granite to a vertical depth of about 10,000 feet to test the concept of deep geothermal energy extraction.

While the FORGE experiment has been extremely successful, there are no commercial power plants of this type in operation anywhere in the world at this time. Can the FORGE experiment site be used to produce electricity, and how big would be the output? That will be the subject of another article.

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