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The Geysers – Geothermal Plants Powering Northern California
- dfsegoat 5y agoI live here and a family member managed environment regulatory affairs for companies in the Geysers for about 20 years. The Geysers power field is a very cool area for a number of reasons. It's dangerous: You can't just walk around in the steam fields. There are risks of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gases everywhere, etc. - but the companies take a lot of care in mitigating these human & environmental risks. I think one of the coolest things is this: > However, since October 16, 1997, the Geysers steam field has been recharged by injection of treated sewage effluent, producing approximately 77 megawatts of capacity in 2004 They are literally turning treated human waste into clean energy.
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- PopAlongKid 5y ago>For the past several decades, small earthquakes (less than 2.0) are regularly recorded in the area. This has been demonstrated to be caused by the water injection process used to produce the geothermal electricity at the power plant TIL that the ongoing minor earthquakes at the Geysers I see when I make my daily check of the California earthquake map are man made, not natural.
- dfsegoat 5y agoIt's a geothermally active area anyway - so seismicity is there to start. But yes, I am pretty sure the consensus is the water injection process causes the seismic activity.
- Lammy 5y agoFun fact: the epicenter of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 2019 was directly beneath the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, a site that hosts a 300MW injection-recharged geothermal field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ridgecrest_earthquakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ridgecrest_earthquakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Weapons_Station_China_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Weapons_Station_Chin... https://openei.org/wiki/Coso_Geothermal_Area https://openei.org/wiki/Coso_Geothermal_Area