NILAND — As recently as 1987, the geothermal brines that flowed in superheated, subterranean rivers coursing beneath this Imperial Valley agricultural hub were thought to be commercially unsuitable for power generation.
Several power developers tried and failed with geothermal projects in the Salton Sea area 120 miles east of San Diego, including a San Diego Gas & Electric-led group that closed a $188-million experimental plant in 1987 after two years of effort.
The problem was that the geothermal resource--a liquid of up to 600 degrees Fahrenheit that is found between 3,000 and 9,000 feet beneath the earth's surface--contained too many dissolved solids. The salts, silica and other particles tended to clog pipes and confound the chemical engineers who tried to separate out the power-giving steam.
Magma Power Co. seems to have solved the riddle of dealing with Imperial Valley brine, thanks in large part to technological and financial assistance from Dow Chemical Co., which owns 42% of the company's publicly traded stock.
Magma Power, based in San Diego, has put three new geothermal plants totaling 126 megawatts of power on line since January, 1989. Except for a two-week period in June when hurricane-force winds toppled power transmission lines, all three have been operating at or near maximum capacity, except for scheduled maintenance. That performance has earned Magma Power a reputation as one of the most technologically advanced geothermal companies.
"Magma has been able to use geothermal resources that most everyone else thought were unusable," said Claude Harvey, senior vice president of Pacific Energy, a power-generating subsidiary of Commerce-based Pacific Enterprises that operates geothermal plants in the Mammoth Lakes area.
Magma Power's quadrupling of its power-generation capacity and ability to deliver it profitably to its sole customer, SCE Corp.'s Southern California Edison power utility unit, has made it one of the fastest-growing publicly owned companies in California--in terms of sales, profit growth and stock value. The company's financial performance has been enhanced by royalties from its vast geothermal rights leases, which cover 48,000 acres in California and Nevada.
But just as Magma Power and other geothermal producers appear to be finding their way on the new geothermal frontier, and as the specter of war and disrupted oil supplies in the Middle East seem to suggest that nonfossil-fuel energy may become more attractive, the market for geothermal energy is in flux.
