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Full Steam Ahead

Geothermal energy is green, renewable and ripe for industry growth.

    Sun, water, wind! You’ve seen the commercial: A little boy races around his kindergarten class squealing, “Sun, water, wind!” It’s PG&E’s promotional paean to “green” sources of renewable energy. Curiously, California’s leading green energy resource isn’t mentioned. Yet here in our very own North Bay back-40, a geological wonder that’s tied to the Pacific’s famed Ring of Fire produces more of California’s renewable electricity than wind and solar combined.

    The Geysers, located in northeastern Sonoma County and extending up into southern Lake County, is far and away the world’s most productive geothermal energy field. Its 22 plants generate enough electricity each day to power every home and business in Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties, and still have juice left for parts of Marin and Napa counties. In fact, The Geysers accounts for approximately one-fifth of California’s entire renewable electrical generation. Yet virtually no one outside the industry seems to know it.

    With relatively little fanfare, The Geysers, specifically, and geothermal energy, in general, have begun to ramp up their image and extend their reach. Even San Francisco Bay Area-based Chevron (while still concentrating on oil production) is touting its geothermal portfolio. It’s been running television spots highlighting its role as the largest single worldwide producer of geothermal energy—even though, as of today, Chevron’s geothermal activities (including where it obtains the energy) have been limited to foreign countries. Still, these ads demonstrate how geothermal energy has emerged from behind plumes of steam, like the Wizard of Oz controlling his many hidden turbines.

    Most of us are just now making our acquaintance with geothermal energy. But private firms, public utilities and state, county and local governments have been on board for years now, especially here in the North Bay.

    According to Louis (Lou) E. Capuano Jr., founder and CEO of Santa Rosa-based geothermal engineering and consulting firm ThermaSource, “During the Gold Rush in 1849, a few people in California got real rich...The guys who made the shovels did, because everybody needed a shovel. We’re going to try to be a developer of geothermal...but also a supplier of the services and materials required to develop it.”

    Private contractors like ThermaSource offer geothermal development services ranging from exploration and engineering to construction, planning and consulting. Energy producer/wholesalers include Calpine, Northern California Power, Santa Clara Electric, Bottle Rock and (soon) Canada’s Western GeoPower. Retail energy providers, most notably PG&E, either buy and sell or else generate and sell portions of the electricity produced at The Geysers.

    ThermaSource has been consulting domestically and internationally for a while now—in locations as far reaching as Oregon, Hawaii, Canada, Japan, the West Indies, Australia, Indonesia and Panama—and is considering drilling projects in some of those locations and elsewhere. But for now, it’s concentrating its drilling rigs at The Geysers, Southern California’s Imperial Valley and in Nevada.

    Capuano began with Signal Oil as an oil and gas engineer in 1971. Then, following two years at Thermogenics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hughes Aircraft, he started his own geothermal engineering consultation service. He named it ThermaSource in 1980. Capuano has planned, designed, supervised, operated and provided drilling rigs for hundreds of projects since coming to the business. But to show how the status of geothermal exploration has been elevated in recent years, one needn’t look any further than his recently acquired partners.

    In February 2007, ThermaSource entered into a partnership with U.S. Renewables Group and Riverstone Holdings (which is owned by The Carlyle Group). More than 85 percent of ThermaSource is now owned and financially backed by co-partners with combined management resources of more than $55 billion.

    In discussing the new partnership, Capuano pointed to its local impact: “We’ve increased our total employees by 120 people since July 2006 and expect to increase this number by 50 more within the next three months, which helps support the economy of both Lake and Sonoma counties. We’re very pleased to be able to offer these employment opportunities as well as first-class drilling rigs to the geothermal industry.”


Going to the source
    The ancient Greeks get credit for the word geothermal. “Geo” means earth, and “therme” means heat. To get from the Earth’s crust to its core requires almost 4,000 miles of digging. And, the deeper you dig, the hotter it gets. Estimates are that temperatures in the Earth’s core may reach 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But you don’t need to dig 4,000 miles to extract heat. While the Earth’s crust is 35 miles thick in places, there are zones where hot magma shoots up far closer to the surface. We happen to live in one of those places.

    It was 1847. Renowned grizzly hunter William Bell Elliot raced up a steep Mayacamas Mountain embankment on the heels of a wily bear, “Old Slewfoot.” Elliot slipped around a narrow canyon corner, his body pressed hard against the steep, crumbling mountainside, desperately digging his toes into loose gravel while a vertigo-inducing chasm dropped 1,500 feet straight into the gorge beneath him. To calm himself, he nervously cast his eyes across the length and breadth of the deep canyon. With that single furtive glance, Elliot made a sudden and startling “discovery.” Famed 19th century journalist Bayard Taylor described it like this:

    “I’ve never beheld any scene so entirely infernal in its appearance. The rocks burn under you; you’re enveloped in fierce heat, strangled by puffs of diabolical vapor and stunned by the awful hissing, spitting, sputtering, roaring, threatening sounds—as if a dozen steamboats blowing through their escape-pipes had aroused the ire of 10,000 hellcats…”

    In short, on that bright sunny day back in 1847, William Bell Elliot felt certain he’d just passed through the gates of hell.

    Of course, for perhaps 12,000 years before Elliot stepped foot there, the Wappo, Miwok and Pomo peoples trod the crisscrossing pathways leading to these mutually shared hot springs, steaming mud pools and fumaroles. For countless ages, they soaked in the sacred mineral baths, sweating out toxins, breathing deep vapors produced from the magma-hot depths of the seismic underworld.

    We’ve come to know this place as The Geysers—but Geysers they ain’t. They’re actually fumaroles: Geysers spout water; fumaroles don’t. Instead, they emit vapors, or fumes—hence fumaroles.


Resort area
    The quest for electricity at The Geysers began in 1921, when a visionary gravel pit owner from Healdsburg leased The Geysers Hotel Resort. As John D. Grant remodeled much of the resort, he dreamed of harnessing The Geysers’ enormous energy potential.

    Grant formed The Geysers Development Company. World-renowned horticulturist Luther Burbank came aboard as an investor. A photo of Burbank shows him turning a valve to let off a little steam. In a letter to Grant dated March 2, 1924, Burbank alludes to a potential investment visit by his friend, Henry Ford, then writes, “I have my own theory of the superior value of the Geysers, that the power will be far greater because they’re situated in such a gash between such high mountains. No doubt there’s almost unlimited power in the Sonoma County Geysers.”

    Grant hired a 17-year-old named Glen Truitt to tap “the Witches’ Cauldron”—the hottest opening in Geyser Canyon. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but after digging down only a few feet from the surface, well number one “blew up like a volcano.” The well-digging operation was moved across the canyon, and they went at it again.

    After two years walking a financial tightrope, The Geysers Development Company was reorganized, bolstered by new sources of funding. The operation contracted with the town of Healdsburg and provided electricity for a time, but cheap oil prices spelled its doom. In 1934, the two tiny power plants shut down when Healdsburg let go of its contract for Geysers’ power. One plant was dismantled, hauled down the canyon and reassembled to provide electricity for the resort. According to Truitt, electricity generated from this plant lit the resort buildings and grounds so they “looked like a Christmas card.”

    But the Geysers Resort Hotel burned to the ground four years later. The local press bandied about various proposals for what to do with the property, most emphasizing that, as a sanatorium, it was without equal. Indeed, that’s just how it was advertised during the brief tenure of Dr. Joseph Sooy, who operated The Geysers recreation facilities for the three years prior to its devastating fire. It was Dr. Sooy who promoted “The Big Steam Geysers” as the “8th Wonder of the World,” while touting the health benefits of its arsenic and hydrochloric acid-laced mineral springs and its “radium active caves.”

    During its 19th and early 20th century glory days, The Geysers was visited by both the Prince of Wales and Italy’s most prominent revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Novelist Robert Louis Stevenson squatted at an abandoned mine just over the hill. The Geysers was world-renowned, visited and remarked upon by luminaries including Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, famed midget Tom Thumb, Ulysses S. Grant, William Jennings Bryan and J.P. Morgan, to name but a few.


Time for a change
    The Geysers remained a resort until the 1970s drew to a close. It was the end of an era. By 1980, the last buildings were destroyed and The Geysers turned exclusively to electricity production. All along, energy development had been continuing right alongside Geysers recreation, even after initial electricity-generating efforts failed to turn a profit back in the 1920s and 1930s.

    Magma Power Company teamed with Thermal Power in 1955. The firms, owned by two close friends, jointly drilled wells as deep as 1,400 feet, selling electricity generated from their operation to utility behemoth PG&E beginning in 1958.

    The first “modern” plant at The Geysers was built and operated by PG&E. It went online in September 1960. By 1968, The Geysers was producing 82 megawatts of electricity, about one-tenth its current output. (Each megawatt provides enough electricity to power up to 1,000 homes.)

    Electricity production peaked in the 1980s at twice what’s being produced today—enough to power 1.5 million homes and businesses. But The Geysers simply couldn’t sustain those high rates of energy production. The decision was made by all parties involved (government and private) to cut back steam generation for the sake of production field longevity. (If you’ve ever taken a sauna or been in a sweat lodge, you know how it works: Rocks are heated and water, tossed or sprayed on these heated rocks, creates steam. But the rocks eventually cool and need to be heated again before they’ll create more steam. In the case of The Geysers, once cooled, it takes the hot magma below years to reheat the porous rock above.) It became obvious to all concerned that the next step should be sensible, measured management.

    No cavernous water reservoirs lie below the Geysers’ surface to draw from. Instead, wastewater is injected deep into tiny fissures of extremely hot, permeable rock. The water wends its way down, percolating through the hot rocks and attendant gases. The heat eventually vaporizes, or “flashes” the water, sending it back to the surface in the form of steam; this compressed steam turns turbine blades, which produces electricity. Each day, enough electricity is generated from wastewater at The Geysers to serve the needs of nearly the entire North Bay, saving untold amounts of carbon pollutants from being released into the atmosphere by conventional energy production. A decision was made to limit the amount of heat drawn from production wells by pouring controlled amounts of water into nearby injection wells.

    In June 1998, the City of Santa Rosa, together with Calpine Corporation, launched a $187 million project (The Geysers Recharge Project) to pump treated wastewater from four Sonoma County communities and outlying unincorporated districts up to The Geysers’ geothermal field. The 41-mile underground pipeline winds along Highway 101, crosses beneath the Russian River twice and travels through the Alexander Valley in 48-inch pipes. From there, the wastewater is pumped through a reduced 30-inch pipe more than 3,000 feet uphill before being injected deep into The Geysers’ steam reservoir through about 44 injection wells, distributed across The Geysers’ field. The project was completed in July 2003.

    The Geysers Recharge Project went into operation in November 2004. Since startup, this system has delivered, on average, 11 million gallons of treated wastewater from the Santa Rosa treatment plant on Llano Road up to The Geysers each day. The system is designed to handle up to 20 million gallons daily. According to those close to the project, it’s been a win-win situation for all involved, relieving an ongoing problem of previous wastewater release into the Russian River and providing water essential to manage and maintain The Geysers’ energy resource for decades into the future.

    Calpine Corporation owns and operates 19 of the 22 geothermal power plants at The Geysers. Two other plants are shared by the Northern California Power Agency and Santa Clara Electric. Additionally, a raft of regional businesses provides services pertaining to exploration, development and maintenance of this unique geothermal resource. PG&E purchases much of the power.

    While San Jose-based Calpine remains the largest producer of geothermal energy inside the United States (remember, Chevron gets its geothermal energy from abroad), geothermal is just a tiny fraction of its energy wholesaling portfolio. From an initial investment of $1 million back in 1984, Calpine grew to a net worth of $23 billion in 2001 before falling $22 billion in the red by 2005. In 2004, its 89 energy complexes stretched across 21 states, producing a combined 22,000 megawatts of energy. Stock zoomed above $50 per share, but it all came crashing down; the stock dropped to $0.30 per share. Calpine filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2005. The company’s plan for emergence from bankruptcy was approved by bankruptcy court in December 2007; as of press time, it plans to emerge from bankruptcy and return to the NYSE by the end of January 2008.

    In May 2007, Calpine announced the launch of a five-year, $200 million project called Repowering The Geysers, which it hopes will ensure continued electrical generation for years to come.


What the future holds
    Ron Suess, president of Bottle Rock Power, is a native Californian and a 40-year Sonoma County resident. Bottle Rock’s 15-megawatt geothermal plant went online in April 2007, bringing the total number of operating geothermal plants at The Geysers to 22. Bottle Rock is currently drilling two additional geothermal wells on its 350-acre land lease in the northeast corner of Lake County (ThermaSource is conducting the drilling operations). Bottle Rock expects to drill an unspecified number of additional wells within the next two years.

    According to Suess, “[Geothermal] trends are definitely on the upward swing, both in Sonoma and Lake counties. There’s a whole new series of power plants that aren’t as large as those currently operating at The Geysers. Theory is trying to merge with reality to produce plants with smaller physical footprints. Clusters of smaller, 5- or 10-megawatt plants may form aggregates together to place electricity onto the grid.”

    The Geothermal Energy Association agrees with Suess’ theory. It cited 20,000 to 26,000 megawatts of known geothermal sites in the United States. Of this, a recent report for the Western Governors’ Association estimates 13,000 megawatts of identified resources are expected to be developable within the next 10 to 20 years, with 5,600 megawatts of that happening within the next five to 10 years. It also cites a larger potential of unknown, undiscovered resources.

    The Energy and Geosciences Institute of the University of Utah estimates that thermal aquifers contain an amount of energy that’s equivalent to what’s needed to provide 15.3 billion kilowatt hours of electric power—or five times the total United States electrical production in 1990. Other geothermal systems, such as magmatic systems, geopressurized basins and resources available only with enhanced geothermal techniques, are estimated to contain significantly more energy.

    The amazing geothermal resource called The Geysers, tucked way up in a corner of our own Sonoma and Lake counties, will continue to awe, and will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in geothermal research and development for our planet for years to come. It’s both a valuable resource and an important testing ground for an industry sure to rise, like an enormous steam plume, into prominence as our world transitions into an era of renewable green energy.