ckk needs some sort of government grant..., page-22

I've done a bit more digging into the gov't grant situation and it looks pretty positive for CKK. This from the Allen Consulting report to Dept Resources, Energy and Tourism on geothermal in Australia:

'A greater concern to most stakeholders is the availability of drilling rigs, rather than drilling expertise per se. Drilling rigs need to be sourced from overseas and suitable rigs exist throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East. However, the costs of moving the rigs to Australia are prohibitively high for most companies to bear alone.
Some stakeholders suggested to tackle this problem, that the Commonwealth Government should purchase, or take a long term lease on a rig and allocate it to geothermal companies in a similar way to the provision of access to facilities funded through the NCRIS.'

These 2 quotes from the ACRE 'Geothermal Directions' paper:

'Availability and the cost of drilling rigs continue to be an issue with geothermal energy development in Australia. There are recent developments in drilling, such as the Globedrill GT 3000, and advances in laser drilling technologies (e.g. Foro Energy funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) and the US Department of Energy (DoE)) for Enhanced Geothermal Systems. While offering possibilities for reducing drilling costs, these developments need to be tested in appropriate Australian geothermal settings to build sector confidence in the technologies.'

'Projects that can reduce the costs of drilling geothermal wells and improve the success rates of drilled wells will be eligible for support under the Emerging Renewables program.'

The Geothermal Drilling Program has recently had 28m handed back to it by four of the geothermal juniors who couldn't match the tough 2:1 funding criteria or perhaps were too cash poor to proceed with drilling atm.

The government has actually spent bugger all on geothermal for this reason. This is crazy if you ask me. The money is there, the strategy is to boost geothermal, but it remains unspent/unboosted.

Why not use this money to securing a GT3000 for exclusive use in geothermal? All of the geothermal companies will benefit if drilling becomes cheaper and more available. It sounds to me, like this is what the 'stakeholders' are asking for. Or perhaps a GT5000 would be more applicable. That would also tick more boxes for 'research and development' funding.

This brings me to a question I have about hook load capacity, but I'll raise that in a new post.

Mind you I think CKK will do brilliantly even without any of this funding. I'd like to see them doing a decent amount of geothermal work, though. Not too keen to make my first million out of oil and gas drilling at this time.

http://www.ret.gov.au/energy/clean/cei/acre/studies/Pages/Studies.aspx