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Hot topics Wednesday 20 August 2008 RAPID ROUNDUP: Geothermal drilling program announcement - experts react The Federal Government has announced it will provide $50 million to the geothermal industry to help it begin making the technology viable for baseload energy production. Here Australian energy experts react. Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. Any further comments will be posted here. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 8207 7415 or by email.
Prof Philip Jennings is Professor of Energy Studies at Murdoch University “I think it is a good initiative by the Government as we need to identify the best areas for hot dry rock technology in Australia. This thermal mapping is required before we start establishing geothermal power plants. The technology is quite mature, but we still don’t know the best places to locate the plants.”
Dr Iain MacGill is the Joint Director (Engineering) of the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets at the University of New South Wales. “Hot Rock technology is one of a number of highly promising but still emerging sustainable energy technologies. Like many renewable energy technologies including wind and photovoltaics, the potential scale of the resource is enormous. However, there are very significant challenges for Hot Rock energy as the concept and technologies haven’t yet been demonstrated, the location of the resource doesn’t currently appear well mapped to our existing energy infrastructure, and there are many uncertainties including environmental impacts. Should it be proven up, it will certainly be a potentially very valuable sustainable energy source and its inherent energy storage and dispatchability might enable much higher renewable energy penetrations over time – well beyond the 20% currently targeted. As with other promising technologies including carbon capture and storage, it will take time and considerable funding to determine how valuable the technology is in practice. Support for these technologies therefore has to be part of a coherent government energy and climate policy framework that includes a serious carbon price, specific deployment measures such as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, with capital grants and feed-in tariffs for particular technologies, R&D and demonstration funding, and regulation. The key policy priorities right now are to drive energy efficiency, efficient gas generation and renewable energy uptake to achieve rapid emissions reductions that buy us time to prove up promising but still unproven technologies.”
Professor Richard Hillis is Head of the Australian School of Petroleum at the University of Adelaide which is currently undertaking geothermal research projects. He is also Non-executive Director of Petratherm Limited. “$50 million is definitely a good start. It will be divided up to $7 million per project so it will probably fund about 7 projects. The government intends to fund a variety of different projects which is a good thing because you need to test a lot of different models to find out which one is best. This funding is critical to get the industry moving given the very high cost of drilling.”
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