Geothermal News and an Ethanol Threat

The 2009 Department of Energy (DOE) budget released in early February includes about $30 million for geothermal energy exploration — mostly for the construction of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) demonstration plants. This is the first step toward achieving enough clean, constant power from the earth to provide around 10 percent of our baseline energy needs — a goal put forward by a panel of experts in January 2007.

"We're no longer limited by just discovering the Icelands of the world,"

said Jefferson Tester, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT who chaired the EGS panel. The report estimates that by 2050, EGS could be implemented to a capacity of 100,000 new megawatts of power — more electricity capacity than all of the nuclear power plants in the United States combined.
The most important next step, according to Tester, is to demonstrate that large-scale EGS is even possible and profitable.

"You can’t just calculate this," he said. "You have to go do it."

Increasing production of corn-based ethanol to meet alternative fuel goals will worsen the "dead zone" that plagues the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new study that adds to the growing list of concerns over the fuel.

Each year, spring runoff washes nitrogen-rich fertilizers from farms in the Mississippi River basin and carries them into the river and the streams that feed it. The nitrogen eventually empties out of the mouth of the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico, where tiny phytoplankton feed off of it and spread into an enormous bloom.

When these creatures die, they sink to the ocean floor, and their decomposition strips the water of oxygen. This condition, called hypoxia, prevents animals that depend on oxygen, such as fish or shrimp, from living in those waters. In recent years, this so-called "dead zone" has grown to the size of New Jersey—about 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 square miles)—each summer.

Previous research has shown that corn, one of the three staple crops grown on U.S. croplands, accounts for the bulk of the nitrogen pollution that fuels the dead zone, said study leader Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia.

Donner's study, detailed in the March 10 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to the growing body of research on the potential ills of ethanol, particularly made from corn. Studies have shown that producing ethanol could consume more energy than the fuel creates, strain water resources, and possibly pose a threat to public health.