"The water must be used in conjunction with a heat exchanger to warm special liquids like alkanes (saturated hydrocarbons such as methane) or perfluorocarbon that have a lower boiling point. As these substances evaporate, they release energy to turn turbines. Unfortunately, they release less energy than water would during this transition, making the process less efficient.
So, environmental engineer Peter McGrail and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are proposing a way to change that.
Eight months ago, his team made a surprising discovery during their work on capturing and storing carbon. They were working with cagelike nanostructures that could trap carbon dioxide when they learned that they could also increase the heat-storing capacity of alkanes by a factor of 20. "That discovery led us to the idea of trying to apply this on the geothermal basis," McGrail says.
In theory, he explains, this fluid could allow a 30 to 40 percent increase in the efficiency of power production from low-temperature geothermal sources. McGrail and his team christened the structures "metal-organic heat carriers," or MOHCs, and with $1.2 million in funding from the DoE, the lab will test electricity generation using different blends on a lab bench over the next three years."
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