An ambitious project near Berlin to tap the heat at the interior of the Earth is being led by an 81-year-old businessman who says he can scarcely wait for superheated water to come flowing out of a well bored 4 kilometres deep.
The free supply of energy is being touted as Germany's answer to growing dependence on imported Russian oil and gas as well as to plans to scrap all nuclear power generation by 2023 at the latest for environmental-protection reasons.
"We'll start drilling in April and we'll be generating electricity by the end of 2008," declared Karlheinz Bund, who was appointed chief executive of his first company in the energy business back in 1963. He has set up a new company, Enro, based in Essen, for the project.
Cold water will be pumped down a bore reaching into a geothermal hotspot in crystalline rock north of Berlin. Heated to 170 degrees Celsius, the returning water will drive gas pumps hooked up to generators. Rather than build a white-elephant power station, Enro's small-is-beautiful idea is to mass produce tiny power units to collectively harness the heat.
The lively Bund is reluctant to make grand claims that he can shift the power market let alone dictate cheaper prices, though Germans are currently crying out for a long-term and reliable source of energy that cannot be cut off by capricious foreign suppliers.
Some energy experts say Germany faces a fateful choice between trusting Russia or backtracking over the abolition of nuclear power, since the main renewable alternatives, wind and solar energy, are variable according to weather.
Enro chairman Bund says his medium-term objective is to commission a site with 1,000 megawatts (MW) of geothermal capacity, though he takes note of German energy generators' announcements that they will soon have to replace 20,000 megawatts of existing capacity.
"I don't think we should be scared of a plan for 10,000 MW," said Bund, pointing out this would cost 50 billion euros (65 billion dollars) in investment. There were enough potential bore sites in the North German hotspot between Berlin and the Baltic Sea as well as in the Upper Rhine Graben and the Molasse Basin, a geological formation between the Danube River and the Alps, he added.
Elsewhere the Earth's crust is too thick for bores to reach hot rock. Swiss engineers testing the Upper Rhine field hit a snag on December 8 when water being pumped into the ground to shatter the hot rock and make it more penetrable triggered an earthquake measuring 3.4 on the Richter scale.
Canton of Basle authorities clamped a ban on that project as aftershocks continued to rock the city. They have since said that the project could not resume until consultants completed an analysis of the risks and this was made public.
Bund said he was not put off by the Swiss earthquake. The North German area was different. "We don't think a quake is possible here," he said. Enro has purchased licences to use 233 square kilometres of hot rock originally test-bored by communist East German authorities.
Bund began his career as a research and development engineer at the late AEG company, became CEO from 1963 to 1966 of an Essen engineering supplier to the energy industry, Steag, then ran the coal mining group Ruhrkohle from 1973 to 1985.
The renewable energy sector in Germany, including the wind, solar and bio-fuel businesses, claims it can meet 25 to 35 per cent of German energy needs by 2020. The last of the 17 existing German nuclear power plants is scheduled for closure about 2022 or 2023.
Currently only 1 per cent of German energy is geothermally based, mainly from quite small plants. The sector is being encouraged by government rules forcing power companies to pay 15 euro cents per kilowatt hour for as much geothermal electricity as they are offered. Enro's planning is for the plant to come on stream at the end of next year and feed 8 megawatts into the German grid.
The company is seeking 30 million euros of equity investment and 30 million euros of loans or bonds to finance this. Once the first site is up, a second 24-megawatt site costing 170 million euros is to follow.
Bund points to a 2003 report by German federal parliamentary researchers who declared that the geothermal power held in shallow rock under Germany totalled 300,000 terawatt hours. The quantity is limited because the rock ultimately goes cold with its energy gone. "That is 600 times what we currently use in one year," said Bund.
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