Gujarat-based Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Petroleum University (PDPU) has got major breakthrough in geothermal energy as its Centre of Excellence in Geothermal Energy (CEGE) found Gujarat’s first geothermal borewell in Ahmedabad.
Geothermal energy is about tapping the heat under the earth to generate electricity. It’s clean and sustainable. Resources of geothermal energy range from the shallow ground to hot water and hot rock found a few miles beneath the Earth’s surface, and down even deeper to the extremely high temperatures of molten rock called magma.
According to director of PDPU, Anirbid Sircar in the geothermal energy and exploitation of hot water, very less work has been done in the State and PDPU’s initiative is aimed to generate electricity with using geothermal energy.
“The hot water produced from the well would be used for power generation using a technique termed as Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC). The ORC is primarily a process through which heat is transferred to a fluid at a constant pressure. The vapour thereof is run into a turbine that drives a generator, which in turn, produces electricity,” said Sircar.
“So far PDPU has conducted pre-feasibility studies for the entire state of Gujarat with the help of geological, geochemical and remote sensing studies and identified five geo-thermal provinces,”
said B.K. Behera, a
professor at the Geo-thermal Energy unit of the university, adding that Geo-thermal energy has the potential to generate and deliver sustainable supplies of clean, renewable base load.