P50. Pick Points

Iraq has taken a look at the current state of the world oil market and is becoming concerned to the point of suggesting that OPEC should cut production some more this month. Iraq is currently producing 2.4 mbd, of which 1.9 mbd are exported. They are looking to raise production by 0.5 mbd. (though some say that exports dropped to 1.8 mbd in February). 75% of this goes through Basra, and 25% up through the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Iran has looked at the same data and is suggesting that OPEC might want to get some help from the non-OPEC group in order to get production down to where everyone can go back to making money. They feel that the 4.2 mbd cut that OPEC has now achieved is still not enough. According to the latest figures however, with production cuts of 13%, world inventories of oil are dropping at a rate of 1.4 mbd around the world. A majority of Bloomberg analysts are expecting OPEC to continue to cut. The question is, how much further will demand drop, and the IEA is projecting about another 1 mbd.

Iran is threatening to sue Turkmenistan over the gas cut it received in January, when Turkmenistan cut off the 23 million cu . m. (812 million cu. ft) supply to Iran. This is normally about 5% of Iranian consumption and is used to supply areas of the Northeast of Iran that are difficult to get to from the South. It was particularly arduous for Iran because of the cold weather, this was the first time in a hundred years that it snowed in Baghdad, for example. At the same time Russia is trying to convince Iran to send natural gas to Europe, via Russia, rather than Turkey . For another view of Iran you might want to check here .

Russia is promising to work with Indonesia to find ways to resurrect abandoned oil fields. Perhaps if they can be brought back to life Gazprom will find some use for the ships that it is currently buying. Although with the anticipated drop in demand, due to the global recession, Gazprom is reducing the amount of gas that it is taking from some of its independent suppliers. Output, to meet demand, is down 20% over last February.

In these times when most fields are in decline, Brazil had its most productive day yet, producing just over 2 mbd last Wednesday, 12,420 bd over the previous record. In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, Chevron is reported to be getting ready to start steam flooding as a way of enhancing oil recovery from some of the older reservoirs. (Hmm, wonder if that is what the Russians have in mind for Indonesia???) These are techniques that are already being adopted in Oman.

With the energy crisis biting as hard as it is in India, they have just taken out the first coal option for South African coal. Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest:

The price for the April call is $57 a tonne. A year ago coal was selling out of South Africa at $160 a tonne , but has settled back to around the $57 figure. But India needs around 10 million tonnes a year from South Africa, and ended up paying the higher figures for part of last year. They import a total of around 34 million tonnes and will soon need more

India is planning to build nine 4,000 megawatt capacity power stations to double coal-fired electricity production by 2017, according to Australia’s commodity forecaster. . . . Indian energy coal imports will more than triple to as much as 100 million metric tons by 2012 as new power plants are built, Coal and Oil Group, the country’s largest importer of the fuel, said last month.

The nine planned power stations will each consume as much as 15 million metric tons of coal annually, the Canberra-based Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics said in a report this week.

The country has been trying unsuccessfully to buy resources abroad, and is frequently outbid by the Chinese, but India has just gained success in Mozambique in being awarded mining blocks anticipated to hold over a billion tonnes of coal, which, it is anticipated, could be mined at around 5 million tonnes/year. Fifteen percent of the coal will be left in country for Mozambique to use.

More stories can be found at The Energy Bulletin and Drumbeat at The Oil Drum.

T7. On Augering, coal reserves and EROI.

Today I thought I would digress a little from the more methodical passage through history that I was taking in regard to coal mining to talk a little about coal reserves, coal resources and technology. It is a little focused towards some of the work that we developed some years ago, and so I give you that warning up front. I am going to try and keep it simple, and so those who know about what I write should bear that in mind.

When you find a seam of coal, if it is near the surface then the soil and rock can be removed from over the coal, the coal removed, and then the rock and soil are replaced. This is surface mining and I will cover that in a specific post later. At the same time there is a point where the coal is too deep for that process to be economical, and so underground mining takes place. There are two main methods of mining coal, room and pillar mining and longwall mining, and I’ll talk about them in separate posts also. Today however I want to cover that point where the seam has just become too deep to make it profitable to take any more of the cover from the coal. One method of mining at this point has been to send a small mining machine known as an auger in to mine out the coal, that is exposed at the edge of the mine.

The auger works in the same way as a wood bit that chews into a piece of wood, when you want to drill a large hole through it. There is a cutting head on the front of the machine that cuts into the coal, and then behind the head is a scroll feed that carries the coal out of the hole, to a point where it can be collected and taken away.

Auger cutting head (Cutting head. (Source BryDet Augers Note the head is shown without the picks that would be placed in the sockets on the face of the two perimeters.

Auger scroll

There is a small video of the process here

Typically the auger holes are placed relatively close together, and they are drilled on the order of 100 ft deep.

Auger holes (Source Lukhele )

One of the major reasons for the limitation that the auger will drill into the coal is related to the way in which the auger works. In just the same way as when you drill a hole with a wood auger, you have to push hard to get the bit to cut into the coal. But the push has to be transmitted down the flights of the spiral sections of the auger assembly. These are not very strong, and they rub against the walls of the hole that has been drilled, so that as the drill goes further into the coal, more of the push is used up in the rubbing friction between the scrolls and the wall of the hole. Also, if you push too hard after the auger is in the coal some distance then the scroll shafts can slightly buckle and this can thrust the auger head out of alignment so that it drills into either the roof or the floor.

The auger is thus a tool with a relatively limited role, though in that role it can be quite effective. Now here is the change that we made. If you take two or three small (0.04 inch diameter) nozzles and attach them to the front of the auger head, so that two cut on the outer edge of the hole, and one is on the inner diameter, then the jets of water that come out of the nozzles will cut into the coal. The jets should operate at around 7 – 10,000 psi, depending on what other rock is found to be in the coal. Typically these jets will cut into the coal about 6 – 9 inches ahead of the auger body as the head rotates. This breaks the central core of the coal free from the confinement of the surrounding coal, and when the head contacts the coal, it will break outwards in tension, in handle-able sized pieces. The push now required to move the machine into the coal is much lower (we had a student with one arm in a cast use a come-along to pull a 2-ft diameter machine into the face). Because the coal breaks so easily, and the force is so much lower, the scroll sections do not have to be so large, and without the need for the high thrust a smaller scroll, that does not contact the walls all the way around the hole, can be used. With this combination, since there is now no frictional limitation to the push, and the force required to pull the auger head into the coal is so much lower, the range of the machine can be extended from under a hundred feet, to several hundred feet.

The small blocks across the auger face show where the nozzles are mounted. (The sawdust is because we cut plywood to see the cutting pattern).

However there is an additional advantage to this change in design, and that comes about because the coal is now being cut with a water stream instead of with a mechanical tool. The pressure and cutting pattern of the stream can be adjusted so that the jet cannot continuously cut into the rock that overlies and underlies the coal. When the cutting pattern is controlled in that way, and with the lowered push being applied to move the auger head forward, the head cannot cut into the rock, but is held to follow the coal seam. The machine becomes inherently self-steering, and thus can drill further into the coal than its predecessor.

I have described this machine (which we only tested in the lab before the energy crisis of the 80’s went away) to make a relatively simple point. With very little change in the design of the auger – using existing pumps and other parts, we built a machine that could extend the range of mining from the highwall of the surface mine into coal that would otherwise be uneconomic to mine, for a distance of probably more than half-a-mile. (That is based on other research I’ll talk about another day). The innovation is but one of many that could be made to transition equipment being used today to allow it to mine coal that is only counted today as a resource and which people are quite quick to discount as being un-minable.

The economic need for coal is going to be such, however, remembering that all the solar and wind energy being currently used in the country adds up to the power output of only one medium sized coal mine, that we will be mining for a long time. As we do, and the easily recoverable coal goes, then in exactly the same way as innovation has made more difficult gas and oil resources into reserves, so we will see the same change occur with coal resources. And of those we have enough to see us through until new sources of power come along in the right scale and from that they will replace coal.

Jets on the auger face cutting into artificial coal

(Please note I have originally used photos and sketches from the internet for this piece, as I get more skilled in modeling I will replace them with my own. I will also more jet pictures later).

Saturday Pick Points

Running a little late today (because of the time change.)

Well it’s time to meander around the Climate Change sites again, for another week, and catch up on the gossip. Since their comment on George Will over a week ago, Real Climate has not been posting. I notice that Joe Romm has a “who am I” piece up, at Climate Progress, after being called

Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.

by Tom Friedman, whose book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, has been sitting unread by this laptop for over a week now. (From my pre-Kindle days). Anyway if you really want the ”doomerish” side of the Climate Change debate, I guess this site is it. By the way, apropos the post earlier Saturday, he can’t read those graphs either. I note that he worked for John Podesta, who headed up the Transition Team for President Obama, so no doubt his influence at present could be quite pervasive.

At Climate Audit Steve McIntyre is off to Thailand for a couple of weeks, and only had a couple of posts over the week, on upper tropospheric humidity and on the number of Principal Components to use in an analysis. The former post explains why the measurement of humidity in the troposphere is important to global temperature, since it controls the feedback that water vapor has on the process. The problem that is arising is that there is now a possibility that the feedback is negative rather than positive, and

And if the pattern were to continue into the future, one would expect water vapour feedback in the climate system to halve rather than double the temperature rise due to increasing CO2.

Oddly (well not really) it has been quite difficult to find a journal that would print the information (since it goes against prevailing political correctness), but it has now been published.

The earlier post on PC’s contrasts the arguments of Steig (who we have been discussing recently because of his Antarctic paper) with those of Mann, who had used some of the same approach in his “hockey stick” work. It also points out that some of this has “no statistical integrity.”

Anthony Watt quotes the Boston Globe, who asks, in regard to 2008 being the coldest year since 1998, the interesting question

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

. But before you think much has changed, the last paragraph of the article should be thought about, since I fear that sadly it is all too true.

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need.

Anthony also had a guest post from Roger Pielke Snr’s Climate Science site which, in turn, quotes a paper from Urban and Keller (pdf). One of the debating points in the climate debate has related to heat storage in the oceans and its possible contribution to future warming. The paper says it won’t happen. There are also a couple of graphs in an earlier post that help explain the humidity issue that was discussed at CA.

And over at Climate Skeptic there is a post on the relevance of feedbacks, and how they work.

Gristmill is outraged that the Governor of New York is easing the restrictions on coal plant emissions. Basically he is increasing the amount of carbon dioxide the plants are allowed to produce. Gristmill also however give warning that the climate and energy bills of this year will likely be combined, which they don’t think is a good idea).

Sea-levels and Permafrost burials

The calamities that are predicted by those arguing for the need for carbon dioxide emission controls typically focus on the rapid rise in sea levels that are predicted as the temperature continues to rise. The rise in temperature is also anticipated to get more rapid, since, as the tundra that covers much of the countryside along the Arctic Circle warms, it is expected to emit more methane. There are a number of other commentators who are talking about this (and which I will refer to in Saturday Pick Points later today) but I thought I’d dwell just a little more on the Medieval Warming Period Experience to counter the latter. But first a comment on the “rising tides” that are cited as the greatest concern. (They were after all the basis for the court decision that the EPA had to regulate carbon dioxide.)

On April 2, 2007 the Supreme Court released its ruling in the case of the state of Massachusetts vs. the Environmental Protection Agency. Massachusetts and eleven other states, along with several local governments and non-governmental organizations (petitioners), sued the EPA for not regulating the emissions of four greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), from the transportation sector. The petitioners claimed that human-influenced global climate change was causing adverse effects, such as sea-level rise, to the state of Massachusetts. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled in favor of Massachusetts et al, finding that EPA has the authority to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

If one goes to the National Institute of Oceanography, in India, one gets this curve for the last sea-level at Mumbai for the past 135 years, and it suggests that there is nothing particularly remarkable about the current changes in sea level, nor is there any discernable effect due to GHG Global Warming.


Sea-level variability at Mumbai, which has the only more-than-century-long sea-level record in the Indian Ocean. Annual sea level (cm) is plotted as a function of time to reveal the variability of the annual sea level over the length of the data record (1878 to 1988 in this figure) (red), showing the inter-annual variability in sea level at Mumbai. Filtering annual sea level with a 10-year boxcar filter (10-year running mean) (blue) reveals inter-decadal variations. At Mumbai, these inter-decadal variations are as large as are the variations from year to year.

The University of Colorado at Boulder has a site that lists, from Tide Gauge Records, the rise in the oceans over the decades, and the site includes this table:

Source University of Colorado Boulder.
With today’s technology it is now possible to see these changes in a more global sense. JPL, for example, has an animation site of seal-levels (the sea-level viewer) which is worth a visit. as well as the patterns shown by major currents.

However if one looks at the satellite measurement of sea levels, one gets:
Source Univ Colorado Boulder

What is interesting is to note that this data comes from two different satellites, and that if one separates the two (Jason and Topex) one gets a slope for the TOPEX of 3.22 mm/yr, but for the Jason data the slope is only 2.4 mm per year, which is more in line with the tide gauge data, but which also suggests that the sea-level rise is slowing down, rather than speeding up. (The average for the two together, I compute to 3.28 mm, but that is rounding).

Now the second point required that I adopt a new bit of technology. The book that I have started to quote more and more from in regard to glaciers, ice sheets etc is Jean Grove’s Little Ice Age of which I have written before. However, as I also noted, the original costs $320, and if you want the new edition it is $850 on Amazon. Much as I find this fascinating, this is a bit steep, and so I borrowed the books from the library. But they had to go back – and hence the step to new technology. I discovered that the book costs $11 on Kindle. Egad! I pay for the machine with one purchase.

I’m still learning how to use the machine, and so it will take a couple of days before I can pull quotes and pictures properly from it to insert here. But here is the relevant section, copied out, that I wanted to point to today. We know from the recent excavations at Sandet in Greenland, that the ground is now permafrost to the surface. However, to quote a little from Grove

It is known that Herjolfsnes remained inhabited until after 1480, though it is clear that the climate had deteriorated by 1350. This is shown by the fact that costumes from burials were penetrated by tree roots until those of the 1350’s and subsequent decades, which remained in remarkable state of preservation, indicating that not long after burials of this time the ground a meter or two deep had become frozen throughout the year (Norlund 1924, Howgard 1925, Gad 1970).

So all the current permafrost in that latitude was not frozen prior to 1350. Thus it was giving off the decomposition products prior to freezing. The farm at Sandet still smells like a midden when its soil is thawed. Ergo if there was no vast global melt-down at the time, and history would surely have recorded one, when these latitudes were not frozen, then there won't be this time. And the Medieval Warming period ran from about 930 to 1350, so I would suggest that we relax and stop all the hysteria.


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P49. Pick Points

Sometimes there are situations that don’t know when to quit. So it is with the Ukraine:Russia dispute over gas. Today Prime Minister Putin “harshly accused” Ukraine of threatening the passage of Russian gas west. (He also appears to be ignoring the “President guy”) and said he would cut off gas this Saturday. This whole situation is now starting to threaten Russian credibility. But the demagoguery seems to have worked and Ukraine is coughing up the ready.

Naftogaz on Thursday transferred the final $50 million installment of a $360 million payment for gas consumed in February, the Ukrainian company's spokesman Valentyn Zemlyansky said. Gazprom confirmed that Naftogaz had paid in full for February supplies.

Part of the problem now appears to be a political struggle in Ukraine

Tymoshenko and her allies deny that Naftogaz diverted Russian gas. They claim Yushchenko initiated the search in order to get his hands on the company's profits and hinder the company's dealings with Russia by confiscating vital documents.

The message has spread beyond just government and industry also is now learning about using renewable energy, and conservation.

And speaking of revisiting crises, the Pakistan Chief Minister would like to reassure the country

Qaim Ali Shah said, “A meeting will soon be convened to resolve power outage crisis in which KESC administration, representatives from trade community and local citizens will be invited.”

The Canadians are trying to help but supplies are short, and still the Pakistan Senate is urging that prices be lowered. Imports of fuel oil are up 87% over this time last year. Sadly, and a little along the lines of my Tech Talk on Sunday, some 14 miners were killed and 19 injured in a gas explosion in a coal mine in Pakistan on Thursday.

Regulation of the coal industry has become the intent du jour, the European Commission has now set in place emission rules that will likely, through constriction of sulfur dioxide emissions , threaten to close the deep mines of Britain. The threats of increased regulation have just caused cancellation of another coal-fired power plant, this one a 649 MW plant in Iowa. Wisconsin also recently cancelled expansion of the Nelson Dewey facility. The utility planning the facility is now looking into wind power but, from a statistical point of view

Power producers have canceled more than 90 coal-fired projects totaling more than 55,000 MW of capacity for various reasons, over the past few years, according to data from the Sierra Club. There are still about 70 coal plants under construction or in development in the United States.

I believe I heard someone comment recently that all the wind and power installed in the U.S. to date would be the equivalent of one medium coal-fired power plant, just to put this in perspective.

Regardless, the pressure is on coal operators to find solutions but what might get lost in the shuffle is that, whether in Europe or the United States, if we shot the old, before the new can carry the load, life could go downhill really quickly. To counter that the IEA suggests that the US should consider new gas and diesel taxes, and open up offshore areas for drilling.


More stories can be found at The Energy Bulletin and Drumbeat at The Oil Drum.

EIA updates - the quiet before the ruckus

There was not a great deal of news in the “This Week in Petroleum” release this week. The cover note described the potential of the Bakken Formation

The Bakken Formation contains a major onshore unconventional oil resource in Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan, Canada. It has three distinct layers, called members. Two of these (the Upper and Lower Members) are shales, while the Middle Member is an interbedded zone of various rocks. The Bakken shales produce a light oil that is generally desirable because it offers a high yield of gasoline and other key petroleum products. Proved oil reserves in Montana and North Dakota grew from 831 million barrels in 2006 to 892 million barrels in 2007. (Proved reserves are the estimated quantities that can be produced with reasonable certainty from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions.) . . . . . USGS estimated that the Bakken Formation may contain from 3.1 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude oil with the most likely average (mean) being 3.65 billion barrels. By comparison, total U.S. crude oil inputs to refineries were 5.5 billion barrels in 2007.

The problem is that the oil is difficult to extract and in today’s news Tristar Oil and Point Energy Trust are buying Talisman Energy’s Bakken land, and will jointly operate the assets which currently produce 8,500 bd of oil, from reserves of around 45 mb. Talisman is focusing on the gas production side of operations, which includes their drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

Returning to the TWIP the curve of interest continues to be the build in gasoline demand:
Gasoline demand from TWIP March 4, 2009

The 9.2 mbd supplied for the fourth week in February 2009 exceeded that for every previous fourth February week on record, and while this may be corrected later it does signify that we are not seeing in these figures the dramatic drop in consumption that would stall the annual increase from now through May. OPEC are said to have cut supplies by 770,000 bd from January to February, and so the difference between available supply and demand is likely to tighten over the short term. In turn I would expect that we are seeing a floor in price becoming established, from which it will begin to rise before too long.

Turning to the Natural Gas Weekly Update the update talks of the impact of the cold spell last week in boosting demand, but stocks remain above normal (13.8% above actually). The spot price of natural gas at the Henry Hub was $4.23 per million Btu (roughly the same as 1 kcf) almost the same as before the increase in demand (up $0.03). Even if you look at the price graph with “optimistic eyes” it remains a little difficult to convince yourself that it is bottoming out.
Source EIA

Further to my note earlier in the week on rig counts and what they portend, the update also notes the fall in the number of rigs drilling for NG. As the plot shows the number is dropping off fast. From the peak they are now off 40%. With just a few more they will match the sort of drop that I used in the calculation, from which one might judge that the country might be 20% shorter in gas supplies by as early as next winter., save only that stored or shut in by companies such as Chesapeake.

P48. Pick Points

Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest:

There has been considerable debate about fossil fuel producers being given tax breaks to encourage production. Treasury Secretary Geithner has suggested that those days should be over, since the companies contribute to global warming. It is perhaps an indication of things to come.

"We don't believe it makes sense to significantly subsidize the production and use of sources of energy (like oil and gas) that are dramatically going to add to our climate change (problem). We don't think that's good economic policy and we think changing those incentives is good for the country," Geithner told the Senate Finance Committee at a hearing on the White House's proposed budget for the 2010 spending year.

I suspect the days of being able to separate the debates on peak oil and climate change may be coming to an end. And yet, at the same time he spoke of the need to reduce the national dependence on foreign oil. The proposed budget would also charge $4 per acre for leases in the Gulf that are nonproducing. But the core proposal is to raise money from the cap-and-trade system that could be used to help pay for the middle class tax cut. The apparent rate for carbon dioxide production that is being bruited about is $20 a ton.

German Chancellor Merkel has said that the Nabucco gas pipeline should not be subsidized by public money. She sees the problem as being one of getting enough gas to supply the pipe, rather than raising the cash, since she anticipates enough private investment.. Germany has long been suspicious of the pipeline. Former Chancellor Schroeder, who is on the Board of the Nordstream pipeline to bring Russian gas to Germany, (as well as the TNK-BP Board) was today in Yugra, visiting the Kamennoe field, where TNK-BP get 70% of their production (40 million tons in 2008 or roughly 800,000 bd). The ex-Chancellor noted that it was one of the most modern fields he had seen, despite the economic conditions they hope to hold production at current levels this year. Italy meanwhile is calling for a high-level meeting with Turkey and Azerbaijan to discuss getting gas from the Shah Deniz field. This is some of the gas that might end up in the Nabucco pipeline.

On a slightly worrisome note, there was an interview with Kate Watters of Crude Accountability about Turkmenistan’s oil production. Worrisome since it has been through ecological concerns that Eastern European governments have sought control of Western investments. And there are areas where concerns are now being raised

Unfortunately, we have seen serious problems with IFI-financed projects in the Caspian region to date. The Karachaganak Field in Kazakhstan is one example where a recent audit by the IFC's own compliance mechanism found it to be out of compliance with numerous air monitoring requirements. Numerous complaints have been filed against the EBRD and IFC for their investments in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, and we have grave concerns about the environmental impacts of EBRD financing at the Bautino Port in Aktau, Kazakhstan, which services the Kashagan field. Among other concerns at Kashagan are threats to the habitat of the Caspian seal.

Completion operations are underway on a well to test multiple prospective intervals in theHaynesville shale. The first fracture stimulated a fourteen-foot interval with 78,000 pounds of proppant. This zone is currently testing at approximately 400 thousand cubic feet per day (kcfd). The Company plans to test this first stage for three to four additional weeks before testing additional intervals. (Note these are vertical wells in the Haynesville gas shale).

One of the big targets for the stimulus package is to improve the national electricity grid, and its ability to distribute power. There are some growing concerns that the investment alone might not be enough. One problem is a recent court ruling said that states could over-rule the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regarding putting these lines in place. Another is that there are not yet enough standards established for the new grid components, although with encouragement these could be developed relatively quickly. Standards are needed, since there are a number of competing products, for example in the smart electricity meters that are used to optimize domestic electricity use, and legislation may end up favoring one over others.

The TVA is spending over $1 million a day in cleaning up the coal ash spill in Tennessee, with the ultimate bill being expected to be in the $500 - $800 million range.

The Department of Energy is already starting to post some of the steps they are taking to spending their portion of the stimulus package. The initial breakdown into ten overarching programs is first defined and then the subdivisions are broken down into the sub-divisions, each with their own web page. These ultimately lead to the Funding Opportunity Announcements, two of which came out today, as an example:

The first FOA offers $35 million for component research, development, and analysis. The funding will support 20 to 30 projects to develop advanced technologies that will address important aspects of creating, managing, and using engineered geothermal reservoirs. The second FOA offers $49 million to support 5-10 domestic EGS demonstration projects. DOE seeks projects in a variety of geologic formations that will quantitatively demonstrate and validate reservoir creation techniques that sustain sufficient fluid flow and heat extraction rates for 5-7 years and produce at least 5 megawatts of electricity.

More stories can be found at The Energy Bulletin and Drumbeat at The Oil Drum.