Robin Bromby | July 14, 2009 Article from: The Australian.
GEOTHERMAL energy - or hot rock energy as it is sometimes called - is coming in out of the cold.
Sorry about the laboured joke, but some of these companies are now starting to post news that indicates this technology is something no longer located somewhere in the mists of the future.
This morning we heard from Kuth Energy that it has its first inferred geothermal resource in Tasmania. That resource is enough to drive a 280 megawatt power station, with a project life of 30 years. As the company says, this energy will not only provide power to hundreds of thousands of homes but allow Tasmania to export “green” energy to the mainland through the Basslink cable. The resource is enormous by gas standards - 260,000 petajoules. The Charlton-Lemont project is the first defined by Kuth, and the company has identified other targets for geothermal drilling and assessment. All areas are within economic reach of existing transmission lines. Kuth is applying for money from the federal government’s geothermal drilling program, which provides grants of up to $7 million for deep wells.
Geothermal Resources is one of the several South Australian geothermal plays, holding 5000sq km of ground west of the NSW border and Broken Hill. It has just announced an estimated resource of 84,000PJ. The drilling so far indicates a temperature of 145C at the top of the granite target zone 3km below the surface, and 207C at 5km below ground.
This news follows the report from Green Rock Energy that it is about to develop Western Australia’s first geothermal energy project. Working with the University of Western Australia, the company will drill two geothermal wells to access hot water deep underground, the electricity being generated to be used to partly power the air-conditioning system at the Crawley campus.
And we have just had a second geothermal resource from Panax Geothermal, this time from its Tirrawarra project in the South Australian section of the Cooper Basin. The 11,000PJ there is on top of a similar resource at the Penola project in the Otway Basin. Panax says both resources can be harnessed to off-the-shelf binary geothermal power plants.
The writer implies no investment recommendation and this report contains material that is speculative in nature. Investors should seek professional investment advice.
