New York Times Article about a new drilling project at the Geysers

[Barry]

This article from the NYT talks about a new geothermal drilling project at the geysers (on the Sonoma County border with Lake County) that has the potential of releasing lots of clean geo-thermal energy and earthquakes!

Barry





June 24, 2009

Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears

By JAMES GLANZ

BASEL, Switzerland — Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero
in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion
three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep
near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that
seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within
the earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set
off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many
in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated
exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the
Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring’s project was soon forgotten by
nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an
American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the
same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area
two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties, have
already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a less
geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock officials
said that they chose the spot in part because the history of mostly
small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited.

Like the effort in Basel, the new project will tap geothermal energy by
fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep to extract its heat.
AltaRock, founded by Susan Petty, a veteran geothermal researcher, has
secured more than $36 million from the Energy Department, several large
venture-capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,
and Google. AltaRock maintains that it will steer clear of large faults
and that it can operate safely.

But in a report on seismic impact that AltaRock was required to file,
the company failed to mention that the Basel program was shut down
because of the earthquake it caused. AltaRock claimed it was uncertain
that the project had caused the quake, even though Swiss government
seismologists and officials on the Basel project agreed that it did.
Nor did AltaRock mention the thousands of smaller earthquakes induced
by the Basel project that continued for months after it shut down.

The California project is the first of dozens that could be operating
in the United States in the next several years, driven by a push to cut
emissions of heat-trapping gases and the Obama administration’s support
for renewable energy.

{snip}

Continues at:
Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears

[Yubajeff]

I moved to Cobb 3 months ago, and this is the first I've heard about the project.
Cobb is 3 miles from The Geysers. We already feel frequent earthquakes originating from the Calpines' geothermal project, in the 3.0 to 3.4 range.
Luckily we have not had any damage so far. We have no earthquake insurance, and the AltaRock people have not offered us any. In fact we have never received any individual notification that any such project was underway. My partner has lived here for 6 years, and this was all news to her. The seismic history of geothermal shows a doubling of earthquake activity when current technology releases energy from the earth. It is astounding that AltaRock intends to perform what can only be described as an insane experiment, which puts not only the local, sparsely populated area at risk, but the entire Bay area as well.
It is also remarkable that Obama's renewable energy policies have faciliated a
sizable government investment in AltaRock! Other prominent investors are Al Gore and Google.
Seismic activity can be tracked at:
Recent Earthquakes - All Earthquake List for CA-NV

[Barry]

---

July 14, 2009
Quake Fears Stall Energy Extraction Project

By JAMES GLANZ

Two federal agencies are stopping a contentious California project from fracturing bedrock miles underground and extracting its geothermal energy until a scientific review determines whether the project could produce dangerous earthquakes, spokeswomen for the Energy and Interior Departments said on Monday.

The project by AltaRock Energy, a start-up company with offices in Seattle and Sausalito, Calif., had won a grant of $6.25 million from the Energy Department, and officials at the Interior Department had indicated that it was likely to issue permits allowing the company to fracture bedrock on federal land in one of the most seismically active areas of the world, Northern California.

But when contacted last month by The New York Times for an article on the project, several federal officials said that AltaRock had not disclosed that a similar project in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down when it generated earthquakes that shook the city in 2006 and 2007. AltaRock officials denied the accusation, saying they had been forthcoming about the results of the Basel project.

In statements issued Monday in response to questions by The Times, the spokeswomen for the federal agencies said the new study would focus specifically on the lessons that the experience in Basel held for the AltaRock project, in a seismically active area known as the Geysers. Fracturing bedrock is sometimes referred to by specialists in geothermal energy as stimulation.

“No stimulation activity will be funded by the department until we’ve completed this additional comparative analysis,” said Stephanie Mueller, the Energy Department spokeswoman.
Jan Bedrosian, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management at the Interior Department, said no permits for fracturing the rock at the drilling site would be issued until the Energy Department completed the study.

The new study by the Energy Department and its decision to withhold financing were first reported Monday by The Sacramento Bee.

A senior official at AltaRock, James T. Turner, said the company had provided additional information to the Department of Energy.

Mr. Turner said, “Based on our current schedule, we don’t believe the D.O.E.’s process will impact our work or timetable.”

Jeff Gospe, the president of a community organization in Anderson Springs, Calif., a small town two miles from the AltaRock project, said the town would welcome the federal intervention.

“The community will be relieved because, frankly, this thing was rushed through from the beginning, and we’d like to see greater study of this to be sure that things are done safely,” Mr. Gospe said.

“We’re obviously pleased that the Energy Department is taking into account all the stakeholders of this project and not just the geothermal industry,” he added.

The area around the Geysers is already shaken by swarms of mostly small earthquakes set off by an extensive geothermal operation that drills into relatively shallow steam beds and extracts their heat to produce electricity.

AltaRock plans to drill much deeper and for the first time fracture the hot underlying bedrock, then circulate water through the cracks and create more steam. The company maintains that the process will be safe and that its safeguards are more comprehensive than those that were in place for the Basel project.

The decision to study the two projects comparatively appears to indicate that federal officials were not satisfied with those assurances.

AltaRock has also attracted large amounts of private venture capital for its energy projects. Companies including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an arm of Google have invested some $30 million in the company.