Geothermal venture reports promising findPosted Tue Apr 14, 2009...

Geothermal venture reports promising find
Posted Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:55pm AEST

Geothermal company Torrens Energy says its exploration project north of Port Augusta in South Australia has detected significant heat flows.

Executive director John Canaris is hopeful that hot rocks energy could eventually supply the Davenport sub-station, a distribution node for Port Augusta power station.

"The power production in Germany went from a standing stock to electricity production on the grid supplying households in just three years," he said.

"I don't know whether we can mimic that effort, but certainly we'd be wanting to turn this discovery into a resource and eventually into power generation as soon as we can."

Mr Canaris says the energy may be fairly readily connectable to the electricity grid.

"One of the big problems with geothermal in Australia is proximity to connecting infrastructure," he said.

"Some of the projects that are being looked at in Australia are indeed many hundreds of kilometres from the national grid.

"The high heat flows and the high model temperatures discovered at Port Augusta are really at an ideal connection point."