- 2894 - GEYSERS - Santa Rosa electricity. - I am sitting on my backyard deck looking due north. About 30 miles away I can see a white cloud of steam rising from the horizon climbing skyward. Those are the steam plumes coming from the Geysers Electrical Power plants.
--------------------------- 2894 - GEYSERS - Santa Rosa electricity
- There are over 20 of these steam wells and they provide much of Sonoma County and Lake County electricity. When I flush my toilets the wastewater goes from the Santa Rosa water treatment plant through a pipeline to the Geysers to be injected into the ground through deep wells.
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- The hot magma 5 miles down heats permeable rock which turns the water to underground steam. Another well pumps up the steam to run electrical generators. That electricity turns on the lights at my house.
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- Before the pipeline was built the wastewater from Santa Rosa was dumped into the Russian River. This was not good for the river’s Coho Salmon and Steelhead Trout. In 1993 the City was facing a cease and desist order making these discharges into the river illegal. Lake County had a similar problem with wastewater discharges into Clear Lake.
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- The Geysers just north of Santa Rosa were first surveyed in 1847 and named incorrectly as Geysers. They were actually “fumaroles” or steam fizzing out through hairline fissures in the rock. Geysers are eruptions of shooting hot water which these were not.
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- In 1921 engineers did figure out how to tap the steam and produced electric power for a Geysers Resort. The plant produced 250 kilowatts to light up the resort.
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- By 1960 the Geysers geothermal power plant had expanded. Operated by Pacific Gas and Electric company it was producing 11,000 kilowatts In 1987 the electric plants were producing up to 2,000,000 kilowatts. This was enough power to service 2 million homes. The population of Santa Rosa was about 160,000. This is just one of the benefits of living on the San Andreas Fault.
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- However, by 1999 the 21 power plants were using so much steam that the local rainfall could not seep into the sandstone reservoir fast enough to refill the reserves. Electrical production had leveled off and the power companies were looking for ways to inject water back into the ground to keep the steam flowing.
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- Santa Rosa and Calpines Company teamed up and invested $250,000,000 to pump treated wastewater from the Santa Rosa Laguna over the 40 miles and up the 3,000 foot climb into the Mayacamas Mountains.
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- There are two treatment stations and 4 pumping stations along the way. But, the electric pumps are powered by the Geyser’s electricity. The treatment plants have sedimentation tanks to remove grease and oil impurities, biological treatment to remove organic matter, filtration to remove remaining organic matter and bacteria before being pumped down to the rock below the Geysers.
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- The waste water turns into hot steam and is pumped back up from the ground into turbines. The exhaust steam goes into cooling towers to recover as much water as possible before some steams escapes into the clouds. The water recovered is also pumped back into the rock reservoir deep below the ground.
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- Next to my house I had installed two seismology accelerometers that are being recorded by a small computer. Two guys from the U.S. Geological Survey show up every couple months to download the data and add it to there surveys of the seismic activities in the region. The last earthquake I felt was in 1989.
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- But, that is one of the benefits of living on the San Andreas Fault line. Of course, one major concern of messing with Mother Nature is that this geothermal electric power generation scheme might trigger another major earthquake in the region. People living in a 20 mile radius of the Geysers say they feel little earthquake tremors all the time. Steam leaving the rocks underground cools the rocks, rocks contract, gaps and deformations create small earthquakes when they collapse deep underground.
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- Could these small tremors cause the “Big One”. We will not know until we find out. In the meantime there is more freshwater in the Russian River streams for the trout. When I flush my toilet I can turn on the lights from the 200,000 kilowatts of electricity coming from the Geysers’ Electrical Plant.
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- If the plant were replaced with a coal burning plant we would have 2 billion pounds of pollutant emissions spewing into the atmosphere every year instead of these small steam clouds I can see from my deck.
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- www.energy.ca.gov/reports/2003-03-01_500-02-078V1.PDF
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- http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.PDF
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- If you want to learn more. Living on the fault line and loving it.
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- November 8, 2020 1178 2894
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