Silica Extraction at the Mammoth Lakes Geothermal Site
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Source
- Conference: Presented at: Geothermal Resources Council 2006 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, United States, Sep 10 - Sep 13, 2006
- Subject
- 15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY
58 GEOSCIENCES
37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL AND ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY ELECTRICITY
EVAPORATIVE COOLING
GEOTHERMAL FLUIDS
GEOTHERMAL POWER PLANTS
GEOTHERMAL RESOURCES
MINING
OSMOSIS
POWER GENERATION
PRODUCTION
SILICA
- Language
- English
The purpose of this project is to develop a cost-effective method to extract marketable silica (SiO{sub 2}) from fluids at the Mammoth Lakes, California geothermal power plant. Marketable silica provides an additional revenue source for the geothermal power industry and therefore lowers the costs of geothermal power production. The use of this type of ''solution mining'' to extract resources from geothermal fluids eliminates the need for acquiring these resources through energy intensive and environmentally damaging mining technologies. We have demonstrated that both precipitated and colloidal silica can be produced from the geothermal fluids at Mammoth Lakes by first concentrating the silica to over 600 ppm using reverse osmosis (RO). The RO permeate can be used in evaporative cooling at the plant; the RO concentrate is used for silica and potentially other (Li, Cs, Rb) resource extraction. Preliminary results suggest that silica recovery at Mammoth Lakes could reduce the cost of geothermal electricity production by 1.0 cents/kWh.