Steam Tunnel?

Part of the road I drive over to the rig goes right by a set of cooling towers on one of the power plants out here in the Geysers. The plant sits out on a ridge, so when the wind blows just right, it blows the steam over the road (there are warning signs about this.



Of course, its much more interesting at night:

LOLgeothermal

Ormat Technologies
Clean, renewable energy


Your doing it right!



Note, the full pic is 8.55M, it's eleven ten megapixel pictures stitched together
its big enough you can actually read the rig name on the mast

The Geysers, in Haiku

Suvrat Kher started a geology haiku meme, so I had to put in my $0.02

Franciscan mélange
Free energy to produce
Mesozoic rocks


Steam from the ground abundant
Turbines spinning true to form
Heat source age debates



Holocene’s winter’s cold
Cloud factories issuance
Money drives it all

You know your stuck when...

ok, the actual saying on drilling rigs is "your not stuck, untill the free-point truck is there"

jar that sucker, it will come out someday

a rumble in distance...

Who says several megawatts of practically free energy can't be pretty.

edit: for the environmentally paranoid, that's just steam coming out of the muffler.

MoMoney

Just completed the next well, it's impressive, here is the flow test into the muffler at about 25% on the valve.

Frustration

I was just reading on CNN about the price spike in gasoline. Having worked in the energy sector for a few years, I have learned a few things about how the energy system works (oil in this case). The refiners are complaining that profits per barrel are so low now ($6, down from $38 last year) that it's just not profitable to make gasoline. Now this is the part the gets me, think of it like this, if McDonald's had their own farms for beef, and the price of beef skyrocketed, their farms would sell their beef at market prices to their own processing facility, and then having McDonald's bitch about how the margin is so low on their hamburgers that its just not worth making them anymore, all the while, pocketing record profits from their farming division. It makes me twitch.