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Greg Reid: Geothermal, the 'Sleeping Giant'

Oh, you nacent technology wimps.

Almost none of you even know what you are talking about. I have worked in the geothermal industry for 30 years, including with B.C. McCabe and Joe Aidlin, the original investors in the Geysers. Which, BTY, was overdeveloped to the tune of 2000 mw, while today it is less than 900 mw, and over $500 million in capital was spent and never recovered from the heyday of the 1980s (see CCPA 1 and 2, CA Deprtment of Water Resources Bottlerock and South Geysers power plants, Unit 15, Unit 21, etc,).

The geothermal industry is in a giant bubble right now, with many people claiming to be able to do amazing things that they cannot do.

Unfortunately, the industry is resouce limited. It looks very economic on paper, but the problem rests in finding resources which are economic to develop. Most of the resouces currently under development are marginal in their temperature and extent. The ones which are being developed are small and depletable. Just for example, are you even aware that Western Geopower is buidling their Geysers plant on a lease that attempted to support a 55 mw unit (15) in the 1980's, and such unit was shut down, torn down and the site remediated and all wells abandoned due to technical problems such as acidic steam, unstable rock formations, and horrendous decline rates?
Yes, the politcally correct view of geothermal is that it is "sustainable" and "renewable". Do your due diligence, and you will find that all geothermal projects suffer from either flow rate or temperature decline--try Geysers, Coso, Heber, Italy, etc (check the DOGGR web site for production data for all of California's existing fields, or the news headlines for Coso's water grab). None of it ecapes the first or second laws of thermodynamics. And HDR or EGS or whatever the farce you want to call it is in front of this parade. The DOE even distanced itself from the EGS reserach with a report on the unproven assumptions required to allow it to work.

U S Geothermal and Ormat are the most viable candidates of the ones mentioned. The rest--buyer beware.

OBTY--geothermal heat pumps ARE geothermal in nature--although their application is site specific--but truly renewable!

John McIlveen: Running after Geothermal Stocks

Without geting personal, as a veteran of the geothermal industry for 30 years, the interview above has to be one of the most factually flawed discourses that I have ever read. NIMBYs are DEFINITELY an issue in the geothermal industry, having stopped Glass Mountain to name one place and attacking even operating projects such as Bottle Rock in the Geysers. The recent BLM leases in Nevada are 2/3 restrictions on development to protect sage grouse. (This is no different than solar or wind, as those projects have been and will be assailed by environmental groups as well.) The economic existence of the Resouce is THE huge challenge to the industry, as it has proved to be very difficult to find in commercial quantities. Geothermal prospects are neither sustainable or renewable in the same sense that wind or solar projects are, as a brief review of any developed geothermal resource will show. (Larderello, The Geysers and Coso are all producing at less than 60% of their developed outputs.) Microearthquakes are conclusively caused by geothermal production and especially injection activites (especially at The Geysers), and above 3 Richter quakes were the cause for the Basel, Swiss project's SHUTDOWN. (Treated wastewater has NEVER been trucked into the Geysers--it is piped in in two separate pipelines.) Geothermal drilling costs have skyrocketed and development costs exceed $4,000/kw now. And the fuel is not free, for a company has to continue to plow capital into a geothermal project as time goes by in a not-always-succesful effort to maintain production.
The geothermal industry is a very risky business and is not nearly as straightforward as this analyst suggests that it is.