Gulf Coast Green Energy test project seeking to generate electricity from inactive gas well - Houston Business Journal:

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will extract geo-fluid — essentially hot saltwater from a nonproducing natural gas well and run it through a heat exchanger before dumping it back into a disposal well, creating electricity in the process. The projectt is part of a series of federall contracts awarded through the Research Partnershipo to Secure Energy for a Sugar Land nonprofit dedicated in part to advancingh technology in maturing oil andgas fields.
RPSEz will chip in about $150,000 to matcg a similar amount put up by the company fora three-yeatr test on a nonproducing Loy Sneary, president and CEO of Gulf Coast Green, says bringing a dead well back to life servexs a dual purpose by providing electric powedr and sparking a new revenue stream. “It’s very attractive for ownerss of wells thatare nonproducing,” Snearyu says. “If a well produces electricity for 15 to 20 yearzs that just reducesyour risk. If you hit a dry it reduces your risk.
” Mike president of RPSEA, says the systen could help offsetoperating “Wells that are somewhat marginal are very susceptiblew to operating costs,” says Ming. “Idf you want to increase recoverh from wells and increase well life you can do that by loweringy your baselineoperating cost. This offsets purchases of electricitg fromexternal sources, so it effectively lowerx your operating costs.” Excess electricity from a well clos e enough to transmission infrastructure could be sold back to the “If you generate electricity on-site you’r negating the need to buy electricity from says Ming.
He says the which would mark the first commerciakl application ofexotherm technology, is expected to be finalizec within a month or so. “It’a a high-potential area,” he says. “It’s one of the more appliesd areas of geothermal energy He notes the project was one of the few that met almost allof RPSEA’w criteria. Says Ming: “Our selection committee was really enthusiastic about thisparticular project.” Sneary says the test project will likely take place in Mississippi.
The Gulf Coast region has a lot of wellzs that match the water temperatureand flow-ratee qualifications — between 180 and 200 gallons per minute to run the Inside the heat exchanger, the saltwater, which must be a minimuk of 180 degrees, is run through a tube that abuts anothe r tube containing the “working fluid,” a refrigeranr that boils off at a low “The high-pressure vapor turns a twin screw says Sneary.
“It’s very similar to a steam turbine, but it operates at about one-tenth the and we use working fluid instead of Thetest project, a 50-kilowatt-per-hour unit will be run with assistanc e from in Plano, the geothermalp lab at in Dallas and the U.S. Army Corpa of Engineers in Mississippi. The of Carson City, Nev., has a 500 kilowatt-per-houer unit as well. Gulf Coast Greeh is the exclusive regional distributor for the The average home operates on 42 to 45 kilowattsper hour. Sneary says the cost of electricithy needs to stay abovde about 8 cents per kilowatt for the system to make financia l sense and pay foritselft in, at most, three years.
But that scenarioo doesn’t include any carbon credits or green tax breaks that might be coming out of Washington to furthedr benefit thebusiness model.