boilingspot: Filipinos Draw Power From Buried Heat

By Blaine Harden, Washington Post Foreign Service, October 4, 2008

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Powering the Philippines on Geothermal Energy

On the Philippine island of Leyte, the development of geothermal energy sources has been highly successful in recent years. Geothermal power now accounts for a third of the electricity generated in the Philippines.

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ORMOC, Philippines -- Ferdinand Marcos, the despot who ruled here for 21 years, is remembered mainly for the staggering quantity of his wife's shoes. But there is another Marcos legacy, and it is drawing new attention at a time of high oil prices, global warming and urgent questions about the role of government in alternative energy development.

Reacting to the early 1970s oil shock, Marcos created a major government program to find, develop and generate electricity from hot rocks deep in the ground. Since then, the Philippine government has championed this form of energy.

Geothermal power now accounts for about 28 percent of the electricity generated in the Philippines. With 90 million people, about 40 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, this country has become the world's largest consumer of electricity from geothermal sources. Billions of dollars have been saved here because of reduced need for imported oil and coal.

"Goes to show that things aren't always the way we might expect," said Roland N. Horne, a Stanford University expert on geothermal power who has visited this country more than 20 times. "The Philippines would be in hugely worse shape without geothermal as an indigenous energy source."

In installed geothermal power capacity, the country ranks No. 2 in the world, narrowly trailing the United States, which has far more geothermal potential, far more engineering talent and far greater demand for clean sustainable power.

But unlike in the Philippines, government policy in the United States has been inconsistent. In 2006, the Bush administration cut most geothermal spending -- federal programs that received as much as $100 million a year in the 1980s shrank to $5 million. Research projects were dismantled. Scientists in the field had to find other jobs.

"Most of the federal infrastructure, the laboratories and the researchers are now gone," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association in Washington.

As oil and coal prices soared in the past year, and as popular demand increased for alternative energy sources, the Bush administration rediscovered geothermal. It has proposed spending $90 million over three years on research.

"That's the goods news, but the bad news is that we are going to have to relearn a lot of what the people who we just let go learned over the past 20 years," Gawell said. "The problem with our government's approach to alternative energy is that it is too short-term. You need a sustained commitment to reach this huge energy base."

At early stages of development, geothermal energy has historically been dependent in most countries on high-risk, long-term investment made by governments, not private companies.

While Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has said little about geothermal energy, Sen. Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent, has said renewable energy -- which includes wind, solar and geothermal -- should generate 10 percent of the country's electricity within four years.

The figure now is about 4 percent, of which less than 1 percent is geothermal. But geothermal offers reliability advantages over solar and wind, mostly because geothermal fields do not stop producing power at night or when the wind stops blowing.

In a report released this week, the U.S. Geological Survey reassessed the potential for this kind of energy in the United States. It examined 13 Western states, from California to Colorado, Washington to New Mexico, that sit atop a hot geologic zone that is often called the Pacific Ring of Fire. It encircles the Pacific Ocean and includes the Philippines, as well as Indonesia, Japan and several other countries in East Asia.

In the American West, power production from already identified geothermal fields could increase more than 2 1/2 times, the report said.

But new geothermal technology -- which injects water into fractured rock to mine heat -- raises the possibility that small geothermal power plants could be built all over the West. If this technology continues to advance, the Geological Survey report said, there is enough accessible public and private land in the 13 Western states to supply about half the electricity now generated in the United States.

"Geothermal resources have the potential to play a much more significant role in our nation's energy mix," the report concluded.

Nature's Perfect Design

For nearly three decades, the Philippine government has been acting on a similar assumption, despite revolutions and widespread corruption.

The showcase for its long-term commitment is here on the rural island of Leyte, where a government-created company, now privatized, has carefully transformed a vast geothermal field into the linchpin of the country's electricity grid.

The Leyte field, as engineers describe it, is one of nature's most perfectly designed geothermal resources. Located about 1 1/2 miles underground, it is a great pot of boiling water that covers about 416 square miles.

Molten rock heats the pot but is kept separate from the boiling water by a thick layer of impermeable rock. The pot's lid is made of a much softer, more porous rock, which is easy to drill down through. About 90 wells bring up steamy water to run turbines.

Thirty-two re-injection wells shoot cooler water back into the pot to be heated and repeat the cycle. Water filtering down naturally through a mountainous rain forest atop the reservoir also recharges it.

"Leyte is very blessed in the sense that the resource is not common to any other part of the world," said Ruperto R. Villa Jr., a geothermal engineer and a longtime supervisor here.

Villa and other engineers here have made the most of their natural blessings, inventing the world's first large-scale re-injection system. After 25 years of operation, this system has conserved nearly all of the field's heat and steam pressure. Experts say Leyte, if it continues to be well managed, should produce electricity for centuries.

"Once the Philippines government gave its edict to develop geothermal, it was implemented with good management and intelligent engineering," said Horne, the Stanford professor who has traveled often to the Philippines.

A Wild West Show

The United States has the world's largest geothermal resource, the Geysers, 72 miles north of San Francisco. But it has not been nearly as well managed as Leyte, according to Horne and other experts.

From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the Geysers was a kind of Wild West show of multiple owners racing to tap steam before the others did. Lacking federal or state regulation, the Geysers spawned 15 years of lawsuits among the owners. Consolidation of ownership and tighter regulation have since resolved many of the problems, but not before the sustainable power-generating capacity of the field was reduced.

"What happened in the Geysers did not happen in Leyte because of better regulation and central control of management," Horne said.

But experts say the future of geothermal development in the United States depends not on giant sites such as the Geysers but on smaller fields, to be tapped using nontraditional technology that injects water into hot fractured rock and powers turbines with the resulting steam. Creating that technology will require $1 billion of consistent public investment over 15 years, according to a study this year that was commissioned by the Energy Department.

"We have seen something of a turnaround in federal interest in geothermal," said Gawell, of the Geothermal Energy Association. "But companies and investors still don't trust that it will last. There is a lack of confidence that the government is not going to once again turn its back on geothermal."