Good News on Geothermal Energy from Workshop at Flatwoods, WV

Earth’s Temperature

Jefferson Tester of Cornell University has recommended a path to 100,000 megawatts of electrical power from geothermal energy by 2050, according to Pam Kasey in the State Journal.  For comparison, the Ft. Martin power plant is the largest power plant in Monongalia County, at about 1100 megawatts.  Tester led a national panel hosted at MIT that produced a major geothermal resource study in 2007. Tester spoke at the Enhanced Geothermal Energy Development Conference May 22 at Flatwoods, WV.

Tapping geothermal heat as an energy resource is accomplished by tapping the Earth’s natural heat, usually through the circulation of hot water between the deep, hot rocks and the surface, and using it either directly — say, for circulating in radiators for space heating  — or indirectly to generate electricity.

Hot rocks relatively close to the surface are spread all across the western U.S. But improved datasets in the past few years have shown West Virginia’s Potomac Highlands region to be hotter closer to the surface than anywhere else east of the Mississippi River. The U.S. currently has about 3,100 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity online, with another 800 megawatts under construction.

The critical challenge, at this point, he said, is “connectivity” — the contact between the circulating water and the hot rocks. West Virginians, according to this article, have become familiar with this idea through exposure to the practice of hydraulic fracturing; impermeable rock, unfractured, has no connectivity and is not suitable for the production of geothermal energy. Creating that connectivity and producing energy at commercial rates and commercially viable costs is what lies between current technology and wide exploitation of the resource, he said.

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Brian Anderson, a professor in the WVU college of engineering participated in the MIT Panel of 2007 on the development of geothermal energy in the United States. He spoke at the May 22^nd meeting at Flatwoods, WV.

According to Pam Kasey of the State Journal, there may be worthwhile opportunities now to use the geothermal heat directly to create circulating hot water for space heating, Anderson said. The northern West Virginia cities are best situated for that use, and one possibility calls out for attention: WVU’s campuses, which already are set up for steam heat, meaning a lot of the infrastructure for geothermally sourced heat is in place.

The downtown campus has electric air conditioning units and could use the hot water only half of the year, Anderson said, making reference to but not directly explaining the fact that hot water can be used for cooling. But the Evansdale campus has the air conditioning units that could make the resource useful year-round. Anderson co-authored a paper on the idea, “Low-Temperature Geothermal Resources for District Heating: An Energy-Economic Model of West Virginia University Case Study,” and presented it at Stanford University earlier this year.

Recall a post in FrackCheckWV.net on geothermal energy from October of 2011.