Geodynamics Warms Up

Sydney, Dec 1, 2005 (ABN Newswire) - Geodynamics is moving ahead with its plan to harness clean and green energy from hot granite rocks buried deep in the Australian outback. In fact, the company is now regarded as one of the world’s leaders in developing HFR geothermal resources. And, with Australia under increasing pressure to cope with tough carbon emission guidelines, Geodynamics’ hot fractured rock project is under way at a key time in determining the country’s energy future.

Bertus de Graaf CEO Australia is the second-largest producer of coal in the world, and domestically we currently burn 53 million tons of black coal and more than 70 million tons of brown coal. With the growing population and further industrial development, you’ll need an extra 8,500 megawatts of power generation by 2020. The question is, how can we achieve that without substantially increasing the greenhouse gas emissions from Australia?

Voiceover Compared with other renewable energy technologies – wind, biomass and solar – hot rock geothermal leads the way, being able to provide constant base-load power at a low cost. Nuclear power has major waste issues, and clean coal technologies are not expected to be commercially available for at least another ten years. Modelling studies have shown the total on-site generating costs could be as low as $40 a megawatt hour, and once production is established, operating costs could drop to $10 a megawatt hour or less. This puts geothermal renewable energy into a strong position for the future.

Bertus de Graaf CEO The hot fractured rock geothermal project in the Cooper Basin provides a new energy direction for Australia. The first kilometre of the target hot rocks has the energy equivalent to 50 billion barrels of oil. That’s more than double the known oil reserves of the US.

Voiceover Geodynamics plant is to produce large-scale commercial power generation by 2020. The company will start with a 3 megawatt to 5 megawatt demonstration plant in 2006, adding incremental megawatt units over time to increase capacity to 300 megawatts by 2012. The heat is extracted by circulating water down four to five kilometre deep wells through an underground heat exchanger. In a closed loop system, the superheated water is returned to the surface and converted to electricity using Kalina cycle power plant technology.

Bertus de Graaf CEO One of the most effective aspects of the Cooper Basin project is that it’ll save millions of tons of CO2 entering the atmosphere. It not only reduces the emissions, but also has the aspect that it could generate tens of millions of dollars in carbon credit trading in today’s terms.

Voiceover The project is located 500 kilometres away from the national electricity grid, with long-term average transmissions costs, including capital and operating costs, as well as transmission losses, of about nine dollars a megawatt hour, or 0.9 of a cent a kilowatt hour. Closing the loop between Queensland and South Australia will also provide major national economic and security of supply benefits. Over the next two decades, Geodynamics is gearing up to progressively supply thousands of megawatts of zero-emission baseload power. Geodynamics’ hot fractured rock project is set to transform Australian into a global leader in renewable power generation.