Petratherm signs deal with European utility

The South Australian company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Enel Green Power to jointly assess and develop new and existing electricity producing projects across Spain and Portugal.
Enel Green Power forms part of utility giant Enel, the largest utility in Italy and second largest in Europe with operations in 23 countries and annual revenues of more than 60 billion euros.
Petratherm managing director Terry Kallis said the landmark agreement is a tremendous vote of confidence for the company.
“This is a strong third party endorsement of the company’s capabilities and of the quality geothermal prospects it has carefully developed over the past two years of investment in Spain,” he said.
“Enel Green Power is at the global forefront of conventional geothermal production and part of a company that is one of the world’s largest utilities.
“This company brings huge amounts of experience in geothermal and European markets along with significant funds to the table. This is an important milestone for Petratherm and it clearly puts us on the European renewable energy map.”
Enel Green Power is a world leader in geothermal power generation with more than 800MW of capacity operating. There is a further 300MW in project development.
In other news, recent results from temperature measurements at Petratherm’s South Australian based Paralana project, exceeded the company’s expectations.
Petratherm managing director Terry Kallis said the temperature measurements have taken significant risk out of the company’s flagship project located in the Flinder’s Ranges.
“Temperatures of 190 degrees Celsius at 4,000 metres are significantly higher than our minimum temperature of 170 degrees Celsius that we have targeted for the economic development of the Paralana resource,” Kallis said.
“This is a major milestone in the company’s development and the Paralana project. Importantly, the confirmation of our temperature expectations also reinforces Petratherm’s unique approach to finding “hot spots” without relying on old drill hole data,” he said.
“The nearest deep well to the Paralana 2 well is some 90 kilometres away. However, Petratherm has been able to successfully identify the Paralana site as a high temperature geothermal target using its unique approach. This involves identifying large granites buried deeply with good quality insulating rocks covering them to trap the heat resource.”
Petratherm and its joint venture partners Beach Energy and TRUenergy announced the successful completion of the Paralana 2 deep injector well in December last year. Temperature measurements were taken more than 10 weeks after circulation of the well ceased, allowing enough time for the bottom section of the well (>2500 metres depth) to be close to thermal equilibrium.
The temperature measured at 3,674 metres using a continuous logging tool was 173 degrees Celsius, whilst a separate maximum temperature logging tool measured a temperature of 176 degrees Celsius at a depth of 3,672 metres. Based on the temperature logging data, the extrapolated Paralana 2 bottom hole temperature is between 185 degrees Celsius and 191 degrees Celsius at a depth of 4000 metres.
The forward program involves fracturing the hot rocks underground to create a reservoir before drilling a second producer well and circulating water to achieve proof of concept.

Geothermal ‘hot rocks’ special feature
For a comprehensive update on the development of Australia’s geothermal energy industry, see the upcoming edition of The Australian Journal of Mining. The March/April edition of the AJM will be out in the last week of March. To receive your copy click here.
http://www.theajmonline.com.au/mining_magazine_freetrial