GreenFire Energy wins USD-2.7m grant for closed-loop geothermal demo

GreenFire Energy Inc, the developer of a closed-loop geothermal technology called GreenLoop, has won over USD 2.7 million (EUR 2.4m) in funding to demonstrate its system at The Geysers geothermal field in California.

The grant has been awarded to it by the California Energy Commission (CEC) through its Bringing Rapid Innovation Development to Green Energy (BRIDGE) programme.

The company said it is looking to execute the project at the facilities of Calpine Corporation’s indirect unit Geysers Power Co LLC. The latter has 13 geothermal power plants with a combined capacity of 725 MW at The Geysers, which is the world’s single largest geothermal resource in operation.

The project will showcase the use of the firm’s Steam Dominated GreenLoop (SDGL) technology to economically produce power without impacting the capacity of the geothermal reservoir or lowering resource pressure in steam dominated reservoirs. For this purpose, GreenFire Energy will install a specialised down bore heat exchanger in an existing low-production well.

“GreenFire Energy’s Steam Dominated GreenLoop technology has tremendous potential to sustainably expand power production from steam and 2-phase dominated geothermal fields worldwide. Additionally, the economics of our solutions are transformational in the geothermal industry where we can retrofit underproducing wells, expand production from such resources with new wells, and enable greenfield projects, too, in each case with lower-cost energy and higher return on investments (ROIs),” explained Joseph Scherer, CEO of GreenFire Energy.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.880)

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