DOE Awards $338 Million to Speed Geothermal Development
DOE announced on October 29 it will award $338 million in ARRA funds for exploration and development of new geothermal fields and for research into advanced geothermal technologies.
The grants will support 123 projects in 39 states; recipients include private industry, academic institutions, tribal entities, local governments, and DOE national laboratories. The grants will be matched with an additional $353 million in private and non-federal cost-share funds.
Of the 123 projects, 24 will employ innovative exploration and drilling technologies and 3 will involve geothermal data development, collection, and maintenance to build a national geothermal resource database. 37 projects will support deployment of ground source heat pumps across the country, including creative financing approaches.
The remaining grants will go toward producing power and heat from new geothermal resources, including deep hot rock and low-temperature resources. Three projects will demonstrate enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which involve finding deep hot rock resources, drilling into them, developing a geothermal reservoir by injecting high-pressure water into the rock, and then drilling a separate well to extract the hot water and convert it into electricity. Another 45 projects will develop technologies needed for EGS projects.
11 projects will develop low-temperature geothermal resources. Two projects will address producing power from the hot water produced by oil and gas wells, two will use low-temperature technologies to produce more power from existing geothermal power plants, and five will use low-temperature geothermal resources for power production and for heating.
The final project will investigate power production from geopressured brines, hot salty fluids under high pressure that often contain a large amount of dissolved natural gas. In the United States, geopressured brines are found along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, and the new project will demonstrate the feasibility of a geopressured plant in the southwestern corner of Louisiana. See the DOE press release, the project list (PDF 163 KB), and DOE's Geothermal Technologies Program Web site.
DOE Awards $155 Million to 41 Industrial Energy Efficiency Projects
DOE announced a $155 million award from ARRA funds to 41 industrial energy efficiency projects across the country.
The nine largest projects, totaling $150 million and leveraged with $634 million in private industry support, will promote the use of combined heat and power, district energy systems, waste energy recovery systems, and energy efficiency initiatives in hospitals, utilities, and industrial sites.
For example, ArcelorMittal USA will use waste gas from a blast furnace at its steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana, to power a boiler that will produce electricity and steam for on-site use. The plant currently wastes 46 billion cubic feet of blast furnace gas per year. Overall, these industrial efficiency projects will result in nearly 14 trillion Btu in estimated energy savings, which is equivalent to more than 112 million gallons of gasoline per year.
32 awards will provide local technical support for the industrial sector through 15 university-based Industrial Assessment Centers, 11 state agencies, 5 regional partnerships, and a national technical assistance provider. These 32 projects are an extension of DOE's successful "Save Energy Now" initiative, which provides plant energy assessments and technical assistance to energy-intensive industrial facilities. Since the program's inception in 2006, more than 2,300 assessments have been completed. See the DOE press release, the list of recipients (PDF 33 KB), and DOE's Industrial Technologies Program Web site.
