Calpine Geothermal

Geothermal energy is a renewable type of energy that replaces fossil fuels in a sustainable way. Calpine Corporation is a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Houston, Texas that explores this type of energy from sources such as The Geysers in California, where it runs 19 of the 21 geothermal plants there. Calpine geothermal output currently amounts to the equivalent of 60 million barrels of oil per year, or 2.4 billion barrels over its production life.

Calpine�s capacity is 25,000 megawatts renewable electricity in 16 states in the U.S. and Canada. Besides Calpine�s geothermal power plants, the company operates natural gas-fired sites. Geothermal power, which grew by 6% in the U.S. during 2009, makes use of naturally occurring subsurface magma formations to generate electric power. First steam is created by injecting water into the hot subsurface layers. The steam is then fed back trough turbine generators to create electricity.

Because of its significant presence in The Geysers, Calpine has been developing programs in the area, such as the Lake County-Southeast Geysers Effluent Pipeline project, which was the first wastewater-to-electricity project in the world. The 29-mile underground pipeline delivers eight million gallons of reclaimed water to The Geysers every day and since 1997, when it began operating, more than twenty billion gallons of treated wastewater from Lake County have been recycled into the steam reservoir. Besides benefitting the Calpine geothermal plants, it also benefits those operated by the Northern California Power Agency, a consortium of 14 California cities.

Calpine�s Geysers operations also include the repowering, or rebuilding, of eight of its older Calpine geothermal turbines. The program includes repowering units with a total current output of 250 megawatts, or approximately one-third of The Geysers capacity.

In addition, Calpine geothermal has launched a five-year, multi-million dollar initiative designed to increase production at The Geysers by as much as 80 megawatts of renewable energy. Calpine�s geothermal experts will be tapping production and exploratory wells (some more than 11,000 feet deep) to expand steam production and to identify new sources of geothermal power.