Geothermal Energy

A well at a geothermal energy plant exploded, forcing the evacuation Thursday of a subdivision. The explosion, on the island of Hawaii, occurred late Wednesday at a well owned by Ormat Energy Systems of Nevada. No injuries were reported.

One of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's recently departed advisors has secured a job handling renewable energy business for an international law firm. The mayor's former deputy chief of staff, Dan Grunfeld, 49, is taking a position with the law firm of Kaye Scholer and will work in its Los Angeles office representing clients in such fields as green technology, alternative energy and compliance with environmental laws. Villaraigosa has promised to make Los Angeles "the greenest big city in America" by pushing the Department of Water and Power toward more solar, wind and geothermal energy.

Barkman C. (B. C.) McCabe, 91, a geothermal energy pioneer, World War I veteran and since 1899 a resident of Los Angeles. McCabe, a one-time securities broker, became active in mining and oil exploration in the mid-1950s and in 1954 founded Magma Power Co., one of the first to pursue the development of geothermal projects in Northern California and the Imperial Valley. He remained chairman of the firm until last year and then continued as a director. In Los Angeles on Monday.

Not far from the blinking casinos of this gambler's paradise lies what could be called the Biggest Little Power Plant in the World. Tucked into a few dusty acres across from a shopping mall, it uses steam heat from deep within the Earth's crust to generate electricity. Known as geothermal, the energy is clean, reliable and so abundant that this facility produces more than enough electricity to power every home in Reno, population 221,000. "There's no smoke.

From a technological and financial standpoint, Magma Power seemed to have everything going its way. The San Diego-based geothermal energy producer had mastered Imperial Valley's superheated brine and last year operated its four power plants in the Imperial Valley at 105% of capacity. The company earned $33.9 million on its $94.9 million in energy revenues last year, an indication of how well it was managing its costs.

All the signs of human activity are still there. Papers and manuals litter tables and desks. Handwritten charts cover some of the walls. Signs warn that "Ear Protection Is Required" to protect workers from the deafening noise. Everything is there--except the people. Echoing through the silent building are the footsteps of Glen Gordon, last manager of the state Department of Water Resources' Bottle Rock Geothermal Power Plant before it was shut down in 1990. Disappointment is etched in his face.

Unocal Corp. will sell its Imperial Valley geothermal energy facility to San Diego-based Magma Power Co. for $225 million. With the sale, the Los Angeles oil company is now about midway through its program to sell assets as part of a restructuring announced last April. Unocal plans to plow some of the money from the sale into overseas projects, including a more promising geothermal development in Indonesia. "Geothermal energy remains a core business for Unocal," said John F.

Unocal in Geothermal Agreement: The Los Angeles-based company, the world's largest developer of geothermal energy, has reached agreement with Pertamina, the Indonesian state oil company, to appraise and develop an area in northern Sumatra that could hold the energy equivalent of 300 million barrels of oil. Unocal will drill wells to bring steam and boiling water to the surface for use in making electricity.

Hawaii state officials ordered a geothermal company to halt all drilling Friday after a well blowout spewed toxic gas and routed 75 people from their homes on the island of Hawaii. Opponents of geothermal drilling near the nation's last remaining tropical rain forest claimed the accident shows Hawaii's volcanic resource may be unmanageable.

What do Icelanders know about heat? Quite a lot, it turns out. For 70 years, the chilly island nation has been tapping the Earth's warmth -- using geothermal energy to heat buildings and swimming pools, melt snow and generate more than a quarter of the country's electricity. And now they've come to California to share the knowledge.

When tremors started cracking walls and bathroom tiles in this Swiss city on the Rhine, engineers knew they had a problem. "The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang," Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner, recalls. "I thought a truck had crashed into the building." But the 3.4-magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec.

Hoping to tap into California's growing appetite for renewable power, Calpine Corp. today will unveil an ambitious expansion of its geothermal operations, considered one of the state's most promising clean-energy sources. The overhaul of the Geysers geothermal project, expected to cost $75 million in its first year, is evidence of the strong demand for cleaner energy in California.

Indonesia, land of earthquakes and volcanoes, may be sitting on top of the solution for its energy needs: vast reservoirs of hot water deep beneath the earth's crust that can be harnessed to generate electricity. What's more, it's a clean, renewable energy source. Yet the country imports millions of barrels of oil and fuel annually. Legal uncertainties, financial risks and government bureaucracy have repelled international investors from developing its geothermal resources.

Re "Mining the Imagination for New Energy," Opinion, July 25: Alan Weisman thoughtfully highlights one of the major concerns facing world civilization over the next century: our rapidly increasing world population with its concomitant, exponentially increasing use of energy, coupled with a greatly diminished availability of oil, the lifeblood of our civilization. Weisman mentions a variety of imaginative "long shot" possible solutions, none of which appear very practical, but does not consider the obvious one -- to decrease the world population to the point where it will be in equilibrium with renewable energy sources: solar energy, wind, biomass, geothermal energy and hydroelectric.

At Allen Clay's house in this mountain hamlet of Lake County, earthquakes aren't just a distant worry. They are an unsettling fact of daily life. Clay points to his kitchen counter as proof. The counter has become slightly bent, causing water to run down one side. His outdoor walkway has slanted in places, and the foundation of his tidy bungalow shows small cracks -- all the result, he believes, of temblors. "If you shake something every day, something's going to happen," Clay said.

An international team of scientists and engineers has begun drilling a 10,000-foot-deep hole into hot rock formations beneath the Salton Sea in an $8-million effort to exploit geothermal energy. The project on the south shore of the Imperial Valley lake is the first major research venture launched by the new Continental Scientific Drilling Program, according to UC Riverside geologist Wilfred Elders. It is financed by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the U.S.

The Bush administration gave Calpine Corp. permission Tuesday to develop a 48-megawatt geothermal power plant beside Medicine Lake in California's volcanic far north, reversing a 2000 decision that blocked the project and angering Native Americans who consider the area sacred. Officials with the Department of the Interior and U.S. Forest Service said the San Jose-based energy firm now can drill geothermal wells on a 15-acre site known as Telephone Flat, about a mile from the lake's edge.

Under a sky as wide as the world, Willard Rhoades comes to the lake to heal himself. He wades into turquoise waters frigid with snowmelt, like countless Native American ancestors before him. Tribal lore has it that the Creator bathed in Medicine Lake, and it remains a place of raw spiritual power to elders such as Rhoades, 83. A dunking, he believes, washes away sickness of body and soul. Now a big energy company has come to tap a different kind of power at Medicine Lake.