New Report Documents Status of Geothermal Energy Technologies

To: SCIENCE EDITORS

Contact: Alyssa Kagel of the Geothermal Energy Association, +1- 202-454-5261

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Geothermal Energy Association (GEA) today released Part II of a report documenting the status of technologies used to produce energy from geothermal resources. The newly released report, The State of Geothermal Technology Part II: Surface Technology, examines everything from power plant basics and their efficiency to advanced technologies for enhanced geothermal systems. In November 2007, GEA released Part I of the report on subsurface technology.

According to Alyssa Kagel, author of the report, advances in technology will play an increasingly important role in ensuring expanded development of geothermal resources.

When power plant technology in the 1980s was developed to take advantage of lower temperature geothermal resources, the geothermal industry was revolutionized, notes Kagel. So-called binary power plants are now the fastest growing types of geothermal power plants, and in the future continued advances to improve resource utilization, reliability, and economics are needed, she added.

The report details a variety of new and under-used technologies – - a few that could revolutionize the industry as binary technology did decades ago. While many new surface technologies would bring about small-scale changes, these are equally important.

According to the report, incremental technology improvements…might prove most valuable in the near term…Incremental improvements can be commercially implemented more quickly than larger, more revolutionary advances, and can be incorporated into existing designs with comparatively lower risk.

The report discusses new technologies such as mass-produced power plant components, recovery of sought-after minerals from geothermal fluids, and the development of new materials for plant parts that resist wear and tear.

The report features a section on non-traditional systems such as hybrids, geopressured resources, and enhanced geothermal systems, and includes a brief overview of two other geothermal applications – - direct uses and heat pumps.

Both reports on geothermal technology, Part I on Subsurface Technology and Part II on Surface Technology, are available at the GEA web site: http://www.geo-energy.org(click on GEA Publications). Interested parties can download a PDF version of each report free of charge.

SOURCE Geothermal Energy Association

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