WorldWide Drilling Resource

NREL Assists in the Quest for Geothermal Power Adapted from Information by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Geothermal energy is right under our feet, provided you know where to look and are willing to invest the time and money nec- essary to drill into potential re- sources. The process can be complicated, but work being undertaken at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) may make it less so. Untapped geothermal energy has the potential to fill the needs of states and the federal government as the country shifts electricity generation from fossil fuels to renewable sources. The problem is, adding geothermal-generated electricity to the grid can take years. The slow rate of new utility-scale geothermal plants is due primarily to the complicated process, which in- volves a series of permits, causing the process to take 5-10 years from the initial steps of leasing land and drilling exploratory wells, to the actual opening of a geothermal plant. All states possess geothermal energy, but a dozen have been identified as the best potential sources for traditional hy- drothermal power. But where, under all that real estate, are the best places to drill? "With solar and wind resources, it's easier to see if it's available," said Katherine Young, a geothermal energy engineer who works at NREL in the Technology Systems and Sustainability Analysis Group in the Strategic Energy Analysis Center. "It's easy to measure when the sun's shining and when the wind's blowing. With geothermal, you have to spend a lot of money to confirm that resource is there." In an effort to assist the BLM, NREL will: j Provide technical and regulatory analysis the agency can use to develop a program for inspecting geothermal wells, similar to what's required of oil and gas wells; j Update information about wells as part of an effort to create an agency-wide digital database of geothermal projects on federal lands; j Develop a screening tool for projects which could induce seismicity. Currently, the BLM manages 818 geothermal leases, with 59 already in production mode, and an estimated capacity to produce 1500 megawatts of energy. There are an additional 1250 megawatts of geothermal energy in various stages of de- velopment. The BLM doesn't have any target for how much it would like to increase the use of geothermal resources. That's not what the agency does. "They're basically the property manager, issuing and overseeing leases to private companies," said Scott Haase, a senior engineer at NREL and the laboratory's liaison with the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BLM. Like any property manager, the BLM needs to know what’s available. The agency took over management of geothermal resources on federal lands from the U.S. Geological Survey in the early 1980s, but "since then, they haven't had a clear, consistent system for collecting data," Young said. Among the tasks BLM has asked NREL to accomplish is filling in the blanks. In- terns will visit BLM field offices to scour geothermal applications and records from 1983 onward, to discover whether a geothermal well was actually drilled. They will follow up by conducting an on-site review on the status of a well. Lorenzo Trimble, the BLM's geothermal program lead, said the goal of this task, "is to make sure that data is consistent across all databases and to fill gaps in data to ensure information can be accessed more readily." Whi le NREL has begun work on the first several tasks for the BLM, the Colorado-based laboratory has already begun researching how to add more geo- thermal energy into the power mix, and has identified 11 areas in the country with the greatest potential for geothermal development. & $ & & !' & "$!(! & ! % "$ & $ ( & % & #' % % ) & +!' ) $ ( ! !$,% ( %& *" $ % & !& ( & ! % % & $% " %" $ !( $ "$ % & & ! % !' &$ % " '% ) " +!'$ ' " !+ % &!& + 36 OCTOBER 2016 WorldWide Drilling Resource ®