Mo Money: DOE finds two sources for another $22 M for GT development
The seal of the U.S. Department of Energy
The second turns out to be a $1.9 million funding from DOE’s Small Business Phase III Xlerator program, a small piece of a $57 million allotment announced in the same week.
All eight of the projects offer real and tangible benefits to energy production in general and geothermal energy production in particular. They may begin to impact energy supplies in short order, and at $22 million, they are a relative bargain in today’s world.
That award goes to Colorado’s Composite Technology Development, Inc. The money is intended to support the company’s ceramic composite electrical insulation system, which provides superior long term electrical performance at temperatures up to 850°C (1560°F). Called NANUQ® are non-hygroscopic as well and may find application in oil recovery from shale and oil sands, petrochemical manufacturing and heat tracing as well as geothermal.
Seven projects will share the $ 20 million award targeting geothermal specifically and are intended to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of non-conventional geothermal energy technologies in three research areas: low temperature fluids, geothermal fluids recovered from oil and gas wells, and highly pressurized geothermal fluids.
Low temperature resources are widely available across the country and offer an opportunity to significantly expand the national geothermal portfolio. Geothermal coproduction with oil and gas wells also has significant potential to produce electricity, as an average of 10 barrels of water is produced with every barrel of oil in the U.S. Highly pressurized or geopressured fluid reservoirs often contain dissolved natural gas that may not be economical to produce alone, but can be economically developed in combination with geothermal energy production.
The largest grants went to projects in Highly Pressurized or Geopressured Fluid. Louisiana Geothermal and NRG Energy Inc. each picked up $5 million grants. Louisiana Geothermal intends to demonstrate that electricity can be produced economically from geopressured resources by validating the significant geopressured geothermal resource base in southern Louisiana and the northern Gulf of Mexico basin. A demonstration facility is intended to supply costing and engineering data for future geothermal projects.
NRG Energy will evaluate and characterize a target geothermal reservoir for development of a power plant. NRG seeks to demonstrate and identify viable energy production from geopressured geothermal resources with the potential for cost-effective recovery of heat, kinetic energy, and natural gas. That is energy from all three sources.
The NRG project may be the most valuable in the bunch and certainly speaks the the current mindset. Geopressured conditions result in the potential for energy from multiple sources. Think of the natural gas that was wasted, and in too many cases still is, in the early production of oil, and of the hot brine that only now is being looked at as a source of energy. Read on.
Receiving funding for Low Temperature Geothermal Fluids are Energent Corp. ($1,200,000), GreenFire Energy ($2,000,000), Modoc Contracting Co. ($2,000,000), and Oski Energy, LLC ($2,000,000). Energent will demonstrate the innovative features of a geothermal power plant using a scale-resistant heat exchanger design that will allow increased use of low temperature resources. The power plant is said to have the potential to increase power production from the brine flow by 40%.
GreenFire will do field evaluations of a low temperature carbon dioxide-based geothermal power plant. Phase I will consist largely of data collection, while Phase II will test energy recovery techniques in existing shallow wells and the performance of CO2 as a working fluid.
Modoc proposes to create a complete “cascaded” use of a geothermal resource, from low temperature power generation through several direct-use applications. The results could have significant implications for the nearly 1,500 potential low to moderate temperature well sites in towns and medium-sized cities in the western U.S.
Oski Energy will test a power cycle technology that uses a mixture of ammonia and water as the working fluid. Further, the system design techniques will allow optimized, real-time, self-tuning of the power cycle process that will compensate for variations in the geothermal production fluid and flow rate, as well as changes in ambient temperature that adversely affect power generation.
One company, ElectraTherm, Inc. ($982,000), picked up a grant for Geothermal Fluids Produced from Oil and Gas Wells. The company will demonstrate the financial and technical viability of producing electricity from heat coproduced in geothermal brine. ElectraTherm’s mobile heat-to-power generator output capacity is expected to be in the 30-70 kilowatt range.
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