GreenFire Energy Making Headway on CO2-Based Plant

Chris Lekkas 4 Oct 2012

At the GRC 2012 Annual Meeting in Reno this week, GreenFire Energy provided an update on its exciting CO2-based geothermal energy project at St. John’s Dome in Arizona. The project, which received a US Department of Energy grant in 2010, is the world’s first attempt at a real-world CO2-based geothermal energy project, putting to use years of computer modeling and academic debate. St. John’s Dome is a unique site for this type of project as it sits on 450MM tons of shallow CO2 deposits. The goal is to extract and compress these locally-available deposits, and inject them into the hot basement formation containing geothermal heat with one single test well.

The project continues to move forward on three fronts: seismic work, well plan, and permitting. The seismic work done so far will prove valuable during drilling and fracturing of the formation, and during CO2 injection. Negotiations continue with several firms with regards to drilling the well itself. Lastly, obtaining of permits is proving to be a time-consuming phase. Necessary permits for mineral exploration and site access have already been attained, while GreenFire continues to work on attaining permits for well drilling, Class V injection of carbon, and aquifer protection (to insure no contamination of local aquifers) all should be attained by early 2013.