I'm still lurking, keeping an eye out for anything interesting geothermal....
I agree with Pooslice - there is minimal skill overlap between bitumen and geothermal so why is GRV splitting its very meagre resources? I'd concentrate on the bitumen, get it going and worry about renewable offsets later.
The CeraPhi input also worries me. This is essentially a start-up with very questionable technology being used to support a very questionable development strategy. As I mentioned before the idea of single-well geothermal systems has been around for a long time but there are no operating demonstration wells. In detail there is the problem of effective insulation between the down-going cold and rising hot fluid streams. There are also arguments that these wells would eventually cool their host rocks, rather than be heated by them, as the transfer of heat by conduction is very slow (compared to transfer by natural geothermal fluids).
Also, has anyone here looked at the CeraPhi website? To me it is a triumph of marketing over matter. I can't find any mention of an actual project being developed. Any leads?
And while I'm here, I think GRV is being seriously misled about what is possible with geothermal. In Australia any project above Winton-scale will not be commercially viable due to huge development costs and resource risk. How quickly people seem to have forgotten Geodynamics and all the other ASX geothermal developers from just 10 years ago.... there have been no magical technical developments since then that would change the situation.
