Intensive Geothermal Power Use Predicted

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31539, 29 November 1967, Page 9

Intensive Geothermal Power Use Predicted

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, November 28. v Nuclear energy was not the long-term answer to New Zealand’s power generation problem, says Mr C. J. Banwell, chief research physicist of the Geothermal Division of the D.S.I.R.

He believed it would merely form a “useful stop-gap” between the development of the last of the country’s easily accessible hydroelectric power areas and the more intensive use of geothermal energy. Mr Banwell arrived back last week from a tour of Mexico and Turkey convinced that geothermal energy would ultimately supplant all other forms of power generation. He bases this belief on the fact that the world’s reserves of oil, coal and uranium are

'limited and on the tremendous advances which are being made in harnessing steam and super-hot water to generate power. “Although there are still great technical problems to be solved before it could become fact, it is theoretically possible to drive a bore at almost any point on the globe and come up with useable quantities of steam or water,” he said. “The experience that oil companies are gaining in deep boring will be valuable when deep bores are sunk for steam on a large scale, as I have no doubt they will be.” Mr Banwell felt that even in New Zealand, which led the world in some aspects

of geothermal power research, there was a tendency to under-estimate the potential of geothermal power. Fringe Areas

The harnessing of steam bores had been relatively straightforward but, as yet, few surveys had been undertaken of the country’s fringe thermal areas. “On the surface, these areas are less promising, but from what I saw on the trip and learned of work being done on similar terrain in California, it is quite apparent that they have vast potential. “The time has arrived when these areas—parts of North Auckland for example —should be systematically explored.”