POWER June 2017 - 11

but also protections so that existing assets get a fair deal and
are treated in a fair way. " EURELECTRIC is working with European
governments to help " recalibrate the power market and make it
work better than it does today, " he said. " One of the things we're
looking at is basically to make sure that the services provided by
conventional generation assets are valued in the market. "
Ruby specifically urged more European support for hydropower,
which he said was an attractive source of energy for
the energy transition owing to its cost-effectiveness, flexibility,
and storage capacity. He called attention to the potential for
improving the efficiency of Europe's existing hydropower fleet,
and exploiting the continent's resources via new large- and
small-scale installations.
But because it was one of the first technologies to produce
power, and its expansion happened in waves throughout the 20th
century, it is generally seen as an older source of conventional
power generation, Ruby said. " I think it's not unfair to say that
people may have forgotten a bit about it. "
Geothermal Drilling in Iceland Reaches
Supercritical Target
A unique collaborative effort by a consortium of Icelandic power
companies and the Icelandic government to determine whether
using supercritical geothermal fluids would improve the economics
of power production from geothermal fields reached an unprecedented
milestone at the end of January: After drilling for
168 days, a team reached a depth of 4,659 meters-deep enough
to reach supercritical conditions.
When it first got its start around 2003, the Iceland Deep
Drilling Project (IDDP) was armed with only a feasibility study
suggesting that compared to relative output from conventional
geothermal wells (which are about 2.5 kilometers [km] deep),
the use of fluid produced from reservoirs hotter than 450C could
increase power output tenfold. In 2009, the first borehole in a
series of wells in Krafla, northeast Iceland-a project dubbed
" IDDP-1 " -unexpectedly penetrated into magma of between
900C and 1,000C, at a depth of only 2,100 meters (m). It was
only the second time anyone in the world had drilled into magma-the
first instance was in Hawaii in 2007-and the IDDP was
elated by its achievement.
The IDDP-which includes HS Orka, Reykjavik Energy, Iceland's
National Power Co., and the National Energy Authority of Iceland-pumped
cold water into the hole to fracture rock near the
magma and create high permeability. Eventually, high-pressure
steam at temperatures of more than 450C, a measured output
that was sufficient for 35 MWe, was allowed to flow out of the
hole for two years. IDDP-1 was widely lauded because it represented
a unique engineered geothermal system that was the
world's first to supply heat directly from molten magma (for more,
see " Developing the World's First Magma-Enhanced Geothermal
System " in POWER's March 2014 issue).
In July 2012, however, repair of surface installations became
unavoidable, and the well had to be quenched owing to the
failure of master valves. According to the IDDP, this ultimately
caused the collapse of the well casing. But while IDDP abandoned
that project, the Krafla project isn't entirely dead. This March,
more than 30 magma and geothermal scientists from 11 countries
convened for a three-day meeting in Paris to work out plans for
the new $100 million Krafla Magma Testbed project, which could
ultimately see another 2.1-km-deep hole drilled into the magma
chamber. And this June, the International Continental Scientific
Drilling Programme plans to pour in $5.5 million to kick start
June 2017 | POWER
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POWER June 2017

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