Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion

Crang said:

Generally the next big step would be to couple solar panels with 1. Storage systems or 2. Electrolysers or 3. A combination of the two.

Storage systems solve the intermittency issue and provides consistency to solar power.

Electrolysers turn solar energy into hydrogen which has great potential in the transportation industry.

This holds true for wind power and also hydro, and possibly geothermal. I sometimes wonder if geothermal will be a sleeper hit, especially with volcanoes still largely untapped. For example Indonesia is looking at tapping its many volcanoes for geothermal. But I'm not a geothermal expert and I don't know how much can be tapped.

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Godzilla said:

I played around with a few geothermal projects and unfortunately, unless the geology is on your side, like the Philippines, then no, you are out of luck. Those exploration wells are still expensive, and prone to hydrogen cracking. The gen sets aren't that efficient anyway, (well the Atlas Copco ones we were playing with) and reinjection of the brine could have issues. (Unless you are extremely lucky that the underground aquifer you are tapping is fresh water. Given the countries that have favorable geology, and their lack of market clout/economic strength, I doubt it will get too much development

I think there is plenty of scope to grow in wind, especially offshore wind, and solar, before we need to play with the likes of geothermal and tidal..... I mean end of the day, nuclear, coal, gas, biomass, wind, water, solar, oil, its all still going to play a part in the mix, just in different ratios. All horses for courses depending on what resources and $$$ are available in each country.

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Crang said:

Which countries did you do geothermal E&D

Any recommendations on projects and companies that are interesting in this arena?

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Godzilla said:

I did the Australian ones. All out in the middle of nowhere. One was innamincka and the other was at Birdsville. Didn't win the project at Birdsville, but was kinda cool to get to visit that town, and my university professor was acting as a consultant on the client side.
The Innamincka one was for Geodynamic which we built but yeah, ended in failure. Can't reveal the problems but it was interesting to say the least.
I would kind of be careful looking in this area. I noticed alot of the companies that does exploration for geothermal gets listed for a few years and then go broke, and then the same people starts new ones and repeats. We kinda stopped making approaches to those kinds after doing the basic research and finding xxx and yyy heading those companies.
My knowledge ends in 2014 cause I changed companies and moved to full oil and gas, but yeah, back then, maybe look at Atlas Copco for there ORC process which was kinda cool since you can tap into alot more available resources with lower temp requirements. There is also those guys looking at pie in the sky stuff like super hot rocks, which sounds good and convincing until you realise there is a long way to go for it to work commercially. Maybe the drilling tech has caught up by now, maybe not.

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t2contra said:

@Crang

Since ammonia is produced from hydrogen, why not just use hydrogen to power ships instead of ammonia?

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Godzilla said:

I did the Australian ones. All out in the middle of nowhere. One was innamincka and the other was at Birdsville. Didn't win the project at Birdsville, but was kinda cool to get to visit that town, and my university professor was acting as a consultant on the client side.
The Innamincka one was for Geodynamic which we built but yeah, ended in failure. Can't reveal the problems but it was interesting to say the least.
I would kind of be careful looking in this area. I noticed alot of the companies that does exploration for geothermal gets listed for a few years and then go broke, and then the same people starts new ones and repeats. We kinda stopped making approaches to those kinds after doing the basic research and finding xxx and yyy heading those companies.
My knowledge ends in 2014 cause I changed companies and moved to full oil and gas, but yeah, back then, maybe look at Atlas Copco for there ORC process which was kinda cool since you can tap into alot more available resources with lower temp requirements. There is also those guys looking at pie in the sky stuff like super hot rocks, which sounds good and convincing until you realise there is a long way to go for it to work commercially. Maybe the drilling tech has caught up by now, maybe not.

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Crang said:

@Godzilla what do you think of this

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