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July 14, 2009
Quake Fears Stall Energy Extraction Project
By JAMES GLANZ
Two federal agencies are stopping a contentious California project from fracturing bedrock miles underground and extracting its geothermal energy until a scientific review determines whether the project could produce dangerous earthquakes, spokeswomen for the Energy and Interior Departments said on Monday.
The project by AltaRock Energy, a start-up company with offices in Seattle and Sausalito, Calif., had won a grant of $6.25 million from the Energy Department, and officials at the Interior Department had indicated that it was likely to issue permits allowing the company to fracture bedrock on federal land in one of the most seismically active areas of the world, Northern California.
But when contacted last month by The New York Times for an article on the project, several federal officials said that AltaRock had not disclosed that a similar project in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down when it generated earthquakes that shook the city in 2006 and 2007. AltaRock officials denied the accusation, saying they had been forthcoming about the results of the Basel project.
In statements issued Monday in response to questions by The Times, the spokeswomen for the federal agencies said the new study would focus specifically on the lessons that the experience in Basel held for the AltaRock project, in a seismically active area known as the Geysers. Fracturing bedrock is sometimes referred to by specialists in geothermal energy as stimulation.
“No stimulation activity will be funded by the department until we’ve completed this additional comparative analysis,” said Stephanie Mueller, the Energy Department spokeswoman.
Jan Bedrosian, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management at the Interior Department, said no permits for fracturing the rock at the drilling site would be issued until the Energy Department completed the study.
The new study by the Energy Department and its decision to withhold financing were first reported Monday by The Sacramento Bee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/bu...ll.html?ref=us
The project by AltaRock Energy, a start-up company with offices in Seattle and Sausalito, Calif., had won a grant of $6.25 million from the Energy Department, and officials at the Interior Department had indicated that it was likely to issue permits allowing the company to fracture bedrock on federal land in one of the most seismically active areas of the world, Northern California.
But when contacted last month by The New York Times for an article on the project, several federal officials said that AltaRock had not disclosed that a similar project in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down when it generated earthquakes that shook the city in 2006 and 2007. AltaRock officials denied the accusation, saying they had been forthcoming about the results of the Basel project.
In statements issued Monday in response to questions by The Times, the spokeswomen for the federal agencies said the new study would focus specifically on the lessons that the experience in Basel held for the AltaRock project, in a seismically active area known as the Geysers. Fracturing bedrock is sometimes referred to by specialists in geothermal energy as stimulation.
“No stimulation activity will be funded by the department until we’ve completed this additional comparative analysis,” said Stephanie Mueller, the Energy Department spokeswoman.
Jan Bedrosian, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management at the Interior Department, said no permits for fracturing the rock at the drilling site would be issued until the Energy Department completed the study.
The new study by the Energy Department and its decision to withhold financing were first reported Monday by The Sacramento Bee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/bu...ll.html?ref=us