Hot Dry Rock: A Versatile Alternative Energy Technology

Abstract

Abstract Hot dry rock (HDR) is the most abundant geothermal resource, and is found almost everywhere at depth. The technology to extract energy from HDR for practical use has been under development at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than twenty years. During the 1970’s, the possibility of mining the heat from HDR by circulating water through an engineered geothermal reservoir was first demonstrated on a small scale. Between 1980 and 1986, a larger, deeper, and hotter HDR reservoir was constructed. This large reservoir was subsequently mated to a permanent surface plant. A number of flow tests of this large HDR reservoir were conducted between 1991 and 1995. The results of these tests have indicated that it should be practical to operate an HDR heat mining facility to produce power on a sustained basis. An industry-led, government cost-shared project to produce and market energy generated from HDR is currently being put in place. That project should help demonstrate that HDR reservoirs can be operated to provide energy for long periods of time at rates sufficient to be commercially viable. In the longer run, additional applications of HDR technology such as water and waste treatment, and steam generation for oil field flooding may come into widespread use.