News

An Australian discussion about geothermal development in the country

Alexander Richter 13 Nov 2009

An Australian magazine looks at the question "if geothermal is the alternative to coal powered baseload capacity in Australia", and looks at some of the issues faced by the geothermal energy industry in the country.

In an article on “if geothermal is the alternative to coal powered baseload capacity in Australia”, David Hollier of an interesting Australian web magazine writes about some of the discussions about geothermal in the Australian context.

To understand one needs to know that Australia is home to probably the biggest coal reserves on earth right now, with a strong industry making a lot of money and therefore not interested in allowing any competition. For example the Australian government, while supporting geothermal research & development with recently awarded AU$150 million to two companies, at the same time awarded about AU$4 billion to “clean coal” development. So this shows somewhat were discussions go in Australia.

So David – in his article explores the question if “Clean, cheap, and abundant: geothermal sounds too good to be true. Is it?”

“…the potential of geothermal is beginning to emerge through a smog of misinformation. The nascent industry received a major boost last week when Ferguson (Australia’s minister for resources and energy) announced $235 million in funding. Two leading geothermal development companies, Geodynamics and Petratherm will get $90 million and $63 million respectively.

Currently there are 48 companies exploring for geothermal sites in Australia, and several of these expect to have projects running within two to five years. Geodynamics’ project in the Cooper Basin near Innamincka in South Australia is one of the more advanced and the company believes it will soon have energy available for industrial use.”

To read the full article see link below.

Source: New Matilda