Indonesia has a huge potential in terms of geothermal steam resources. Indonesia archipelago that is made of ring of volcanoes is the main reason of it. It is often reported that Indonesia has 40% of the world’s potential geothermal resources, estimated at 28,000 megawatts (MW).
Although geothermal power plant is one of conservative power generation technology, there still a lot of people in Indonesia do not know about the existence of such power plant. Geothermal is not popular and kind of receiving wrong perception in environmental point of view, yet it is not.
In Indonesia, the first shallow geothermal well was drilled in Kamojang in 1926 by Dutch colonial government. Also in this location in 1978, the geothermal power plant was built. We can count that more than 40 years that geothermal steam has been harvested in Indonesia, yet its development is not massive compared to the potential. Until today, ‘only’ 2,000 megawatts of electricity have been generated.
This disappointing condition actually does not happen in Indonesia only, similar situation is also perceived among other geothermal rich countries. Researches have been done to find the gap on how to accelerate the development of geothermal power plant. The come up solutions often struggle with the same problem. It is the cost. Similar with oil and gas, it is needed to drill the ground into some depth to find the geothermal steam. However, the location, the drill depth, and the well drilling dimension make it even more costly.
The Location
Geothermal fields are often remote, far from developed areas, and require significant
site preparation before drilling can begin. Considering the fact that volcano mountainous area is the particular location of a geothermal system, the access road is quite long, even tens of kilometers and often not in a good condition. Whereas, due to drilling equipment mobility requirement, the access road to and from the location shall be able to pass by a 40-ft truck. Thus, the geothermal developer requires to provide the infrastructure, either by enlarging the road or creating a new asphalt road. The high elevation also significantly adds difficulty to the road development.
The Drill Depth
The drill depth of a geothermal fixture is varies between hundreds to thousands of meters. Only a shallow drilling has hundreds meters depth which is done for exploration survey matters. The average drill depth for a geothermal production well is between 2,000 to 3,000 meters.
The Well Drilling Dimension
We can see comparable pictures of typical schematic of an oil well (left) and geothermal well (right) below. It is clearly shown that geothermal wells are bigger, yet similar configuration with oil wells.
Beside those factors, one thing which extremely important that can calls off a deal of a geothermal development to start is the electricity tariff. Geothermal steam is only economically feasible to utilize for electric power generation purpose at this moment. It makes the development is highly dependent with the electricity tariff at the particular area. If the tariff is low, geothermal is generally not an option. Unless the government take actions, the future of geothermal development seems not going to be brighter.
Chase Your Dreams. 