Clean Power Generation

Deliver clean power generation by a new geothermal heat extraction process

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will try to find out if their innovative approach can safely and economically extract and convert heat from vast untapped geothermal resources. A lot of promise is seen in a new method for capturing significantly more heat from low-temperature geothermal resource.

Moreover, in addition to being a clean source of energy with no greenhouse gas emissions, geothermal is also a steady and dependable source of power.

"By the end of the calendar year, we plan to have a functioning bench-top prototype generating electricity," predicts PNNL Laboratory Fellow Pete McGrail. "If successful, enhanced geothermal systems like this could become an important energy source." A technical and economic analysis conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that enhanced geothermal systems could provide 10 percent of the nation's overall electrical generating capacity by 2050.

"Some novel research on nanomaterials used to capture carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels actually led us to this discovery," said McGrail. "Scientific breakthroughs can come from some very unintuitive connections."