The work of Brian Anderson, assistant professor of chemical engineering in WVU’s College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, to explore the potential for a geothermal energy bonanza in West Virginia was highlighted in the most recent issues of the Sierra Club’s print and online magazine.
The magazine ran a visual feature explaining how recent scientific findings found that the Mountain State sits on top of a geothermal hot spot 2.4 miles down that could theoretically provide 18,890 megawatts of energy in the future. That number is more than the energy currently generated by the state’s coal operations.
WVU’s Anderson is at work with a $1.2 million grant from the US Department of Energy to assess “enhanced geothermal systems.”
Anderson is profiled in a side story augmenting the graphic that depicts the location of the West Virginia geothermal pocket, the potential it holds for powering homes and businesses and the difficulties ahead in accessing that potential.
The profile explains that Anderson grew up the son of a fossil fuel engineer and, after leaving Appalachia to earn a Ph.D. from MIT, returned to West Virginia because “It just made sense to a guy who’d grown up among oil pumps and coalfields.”
Anderson told the Sierra Club’s David Ferris that he wants to change the landscape of energy usage.
“West Virginia is an energy state and I am a West Virginian through and through,” Anderson said in the magazine. “Ultimately, I want to change the landscape of energy usage. I want geothermal to be viable anywhere.”
Anderson is the lead researcher on the DOE project that was funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He is joined by colleagues from Cornell University, Iowa State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Anderson has explained that the approach to reach the geothermal opportunities involves drilling into the earth in an area with hot or warm rocks, pumping water through those rocks to bring the heated water back to the surface and using that water to heat buildings or generate electricity.
U.S. geothermal resources have been generally restricted to isolated areas of the west, where rocks are hot at relatively shallow depths and where some states already use geothermal energy for heating and electricity.
In the eastern U.S., rocks under the earth are not as hot. Anderson and his colleagues will investigate new methods of using the lower-temperature eastern resources, some involving the use of geothermal resources in combination with other forms of renewable energy such as biomass.
“We are leading the effort to integrate what we learn into national energy deployment models,” Anderson said when the grant award was announced. “If we can realize the full geothermal potential of the high-temperature resources in the west and the lower-temperature geothermal resources in the east, it will make a huge difference in the overall energy picture of our country.”
-WVU-
gg/06/30/11
CONTACT: Gerrill Griffith; WVU Research Corp.
304.293.3743; Gerrill.Griffith@mail.wvu.edu
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