geothermal - best placed to replace coal?, page-7

Iory is right about Basel in Switzerland suffering earth tremors that seem directly caused by goethermal testing. But it should be remembered that Basel is in a active earthquake zone and many years ago was hit by a naturally occuring earthquake.

Also just recently, in California, drilling by a geothermal company was stopped over concerns about it triggering earthquakes. But this drilling was right into an already active faultline (one of the more unstable faults in the world - what were they thinking?).

Most of the hot dry rock geothermal drilling in Australia is not in active quake zones. One of the major attractions of what is being attempted here, and Australia currently is at the cutting edge, is that this technology allows geothermal sites to be established in the middle of the tectonic plates which are seismically stable, not on the unstable edges (like in NZ, PNG, US and Iceland) where most of the existing geothermal plants exist.

There is little doubt that if geothermal work triggered a major quake in a populated area it would be a "drop dead" event for this emerging technology.

But the chances of geothermal being a major contributor to our power grid in 10 years time is substantially greater than that of "clean coal" or nuclear. Nuclear was how John Howard put off the threat of viable alternative energies to the coal industry and "clean coal" is what Greg Combet and Kevin Rudd is using.

See last week's Four Corners program to see what a red herring "clean coal" really is. But if you put your money on geothermal be advised that you are punting against the coal companies and the coal unions. Any profits you make here will be in spite of them.