TY - GEN
T1 - Potential economic values of minerals in brines of identified hydrothermal systems in the US
AU - Neupane, Ghanashyam
AU - Wendt, Daniel S.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by funding by the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Geothermal Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy under the U.S. Department of Energy Contract Nos. DE-AC07-05ID14517 with Idaho National Laboratory. Chad Augustine (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL) provided GETEM output results for this study. Earl Mattson (Idaho National Laboratory, INL) provided critical comments on the early version of the manuscript that significantly helped improve the paper.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Geothermal resources have been used as a source of clean and sustainable baseload power for many years. However, the upfront deployment costs of geothermal technologies are high. Various approaches are considered to make geothermal energy more economically attractive for developers. One potential approach to increase revenue is through recovery of minerals present in geothermal brines. In this paper, we assess the mineral contents in brines from several US geothermal resource areas. Geothermal brine chemistry data were assembled from literature reviews and the brine mass-flow rates were estimated using GETEM with site-specific resource potential input from the GeoVision geothermal resource database. Our study shows that several minerals could be economically recovered from geothermal brines. Specially, potential revenues from recovery of Au, Cs, Rb, Li, and SiO2 look promising for several sites. However, several outstanding technological, financial, market, as well as site-specific challenges need to be evaluated for economic recovery of these minerals.
AB - Geothermal resources have been used as a source of clean and sustainable baseload power for many years. However, the upfront deployment costs of geothermal technologies are high. Various approaches are considered to make geothermal energy more economically attractive for developers. One potential approach to increase revenue is through recovery of minerals present in geothermal brines. In this paper, we assess the mineral contents in brines from several US geothermal resource areas. Geothermal brine chemistry data were assembled from literature reviews and the brine mass-flow rates were estimated using GETEM with site-specific resource potential input from the GeoVision geothermal resource database. Our study shows that several minerals could be economically recovered from geothermal brines. Specially, potential revenues from recovery of Au, Cs, Rb, Li, and SiO2 look promising for several sites. However, several outstanding technological, financial, market, as well as site-specific challenges need to be evaluated for economic recovery of these minerals.
KW - Brine mining
KW - Geothermal brines
KW - Geovision study
KW - Mineral recovery
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85041054668
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85041054668
T3 - Transactions - Geothermal Resources Council
SP - 1938
EP - 1956
BT - Geothermal Energy
PB - Geothermal Resources Council
T2 - Geothermal Resources Council 41st Annual Meeting - Geothermal Energy: Power To Do More, GRC 2017
Y2 - 1 October 2017 through 4 October 2017
ER -