Geothermal Projects and Scale Considerations:
Project Examples and Opportunities for WA

Sean Webb
Western Australian Geothermal Centre of Excellence

SEN Guest Presentation
Monday 13th February, 2012 6pm for a 6:30 start
City West Lotteries House: 2 Delhi St, West Perth
(next to City West train station)
Free event, refreshments provided

Perth, and most other Australian cities, have a number of large Direct Heat Use (DHU) installations providing geothermal air conditioning or heating to large buildings, complexes and aquatic centres.  Some good examples of these, which have been operating for a number of years, are Perth’s Challenge Stadium (operates a number of Olympic sized swimming pools) and Geoscience Australia’s building in Symonston, near Canberra which has space for 700 people and operates a large Ground Source Heat Pump system (GSHP) comprising of 350 100m deep bore holes. These projects most often involve drilling bore holes/wells somewhere between tens of meters in depth and as far as 1 kilometre below ground. The costs of drilling and below ground piping/ well casings can often make up the majority of the capital cost of these installations. Typically, these larger and deeper projects cost A$100,000s and up to A$2 million and extract heat from groundwater within the 40-50°C heat range.

Scaling up geothermal projects by going deeper and hotter adds an order of magnitude to the project implementation costs, due mostly to the much larger drilling rigs needed to penetrate to depth (2-3+ kilometres) and with adequate bottom hole well diameter to produce effective flow rates.

A report commissioned by Australia’s Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism compared Australian electricity generation technology costs across a number of fossil, renewable, and nuclear technologies. It found that Australian deep geothermal exploration technology sectors are costed at the lowest end of the AUD/MWh scale of low emission technologies, including wind and solar. Global installed capacity in geothermal electricity generation is presently in excess of 10 GigaWatts (GWe) but Australia only generates less that 100 KiloWatts (KWe) of net capacity. So, how can Australia plan forward, follow a path to these lower costs of generation figures and meet the ever increasing need for low emissions energy generation through establishing viable geothermal projects at scale?

Electricity generation from Hot Sedimentary Aquifers in a non-volcanic environment (like Australia) is viable and has been implemented effectively in projects outside Australia. Utilising the heat left over after electricity generation is also viable for district heating, cooling, desalination and a number of other cascaded energy uses.

The presentation will explore opportunities for WA and takes note of successful international projects that offer valuable learnings for our benefit.

Sean Webb is the Business Manager and a board member of the Western Australian Geothermal Centre of Excellence.  His career has progressed in business development and operational management roles through industries such as Aircraft Leasing & Operations, Finance and now Research & Development. Through these roles Sean has gained over 16 years of experience. Besides his commercial experience, Sean holds a BBS(Hons) degree, is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and is a prize winning MBA graduate from UWA. He is also Vice-Chair of the Sustainable Energy Association, the Industry Chamber for sustainable energy in Western Australia and on the organising committee for the West Australian Geothermal Energy Symposium which will be held on April 2 & 3 in West Perth.