Geothermal Power

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Nearly two-thirds of the oil we use comes from wells drilled using polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) bits, originally developed 30 years ago to lower the cost of geothermal drilling. Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. Navy recently brought the technology full circle, showing how geothermal drillers might use it.
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A new geospatial application developed by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) allows users to map potential renewable energy resources in the United States. The interactive tool is called RE Atlas, and is free to use and available online.
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New technology is being developed at Oregon State University to capture and use the low-to-medium grade waste heat from automobiles, diesel generators, or factories and electrical utilities. The new systems should be able to use much of that waste heat either in cooling or the production of electricity.
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University of Minnesota researchers have developed an innovative approach to tapping heat beneath the Earth’s surface. The method is expected to not only produce renewable electricity far more efficiently than conventional geothermal systems, but also help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.
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DOE has announced that up to $70 million is available in funding for technology advancements in geothermal energy. Innovations in exploration technologies to locate geothermal energy resources and improvements in resource characterization, drilling, and reservoir engineering techniques are targeted.
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The Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Program recently announced a $15 million funding opportunity to research and develop innovative methods to extract heat from geothermal resources from the Earth’s crust to produce clean, renewable energy.
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Scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have come up with an innovative approach that can safely and economically extract and convert heat from untapped geothermal resources. The heat recovery method makes the most of low-temperature “hot rock” resources.
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In the near future, a crumbling parking lot in downtown Dallas, Texas will be the location of the first fully sustainable, urban square block in the United States. Re:Vision Dallas is the sixth competition in a series from the San Francisco, California-based organization, Urban Re:Vision – a group of people focused on changing the urban landscape by re-imagining the components which make up a city block.
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A proposed system would exploit the ocean thermal gradient for recharging the batteries in a battery-powered unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) of a type that has been deployed in large numbers to research global warming. A UUV of this type travels between the ocean surface and depths, measuring temperature and salinity.
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An alternative system for exploiting the ocean thermal gradient to generate power would be based on the thawing-expansion/freezing-contraction behavior of a wax, or perhaps another suitable phase-change material. The power generated by this system would be used to recharge the batteries in a battery-powered unmanned underwater vehicle.
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