Sidr, I can agree with most of what you say but wouldnote that...

Sidr,
I can agree with most of what you say but would
note that

a) The geothermal energy areas that are being looked
at, and worked on, are in sedimentary basins where the
sediments provide a "blanket" to heat conduction, reducing
heat transfer to the surface and allowing the underlying
rock to heat up to temperatures where they are hot
enough to provide useful heat at a reasonable depth.
As you say Charters Towers is not one of these areas.

B) Being able to fracture the rock over a considerable
horizontal distance in order to let water circulate is
critically dependent on the stress direction and stress
levels. I am lead to believe that areas of Oz may be
amenable but not many other areas of the world are.

c) as far as I am aware no company in Oz has yet
categorically (spelling) announced that they can
make it work. There are a number of companies trying
and hopefully some, or all, will be eventually successful.

d) The amount of water used in drilling is not that
much in the scheme of things. Although it is
conceivable that one may use pelton wheels I suspect
that the economics would not work.
In the end, if you pipe water down a mine you
are going to have to pump it out. Much cheaper
to reuse water that is already down there.

e) 1 degree per 100 metres is not much but 20 degrees
in 2000 metres is a lot in the tropics. One could
bet that if they mine at this depth they will have
to use refrigeration ventiliation. If they have
10m ounces at shallower depths as, they claim, the
whole exercise of deep mining would seem to be
academic, at least for many years.

f) To me, the concept of a big fat mother load at
a depth of 2000 metres defies physical logic.
To generate such a lode would require that
the 2000 metres of rock above it would need to be
uplifted to create the space to contain this load.
Logically, the molten quartz containing the gold,
has been forced up faults or zones of weakness from
the upper mantle ~40km down. Thus, I would expect
them to find that there are seams of gold down
to 2000m but so what. It would seem that
that they should be using their limited fiscal
resources to produce and market gold. Only
when these fiscal resources are large should they
start playing games looking for extra resources that
will only be mined in 20 or so years time.

g) To get the extra funds that that they require
to increase the rate of production will require
that they can convince the market that thay can
deliver. Getting gold out of the ground is the
way to do this. As evidenced by the current share
price few investors believe that they have 10m
ounces and can mine it profitably.

To date thay have made projections but have not
delivered. This catches the suckers (e.g. me) but,
after a while, not the real investment money.

Thats my two bob's worth.