A magma power plant does not consume fuel as the energy comes from the earth itself.
It is much more environmentally friendly than many other methods of energy production, including nuclear.
It is also capable of producing storable fuel such as hydrogen gas, encouraging a 'hydrogen economy'.
What Is a Magma Geothermal Power Plant?
A Magma Energy Utilization Process power plant (Figure 2.) was designed by the Sandia Laboratory in the late 1970’s. The design utilized, at that time, all the best possibilities that might be incorporated into such a power plant. It included all the results from the Sandia drilling into the Hawaii lava lake, Kilauea Ika including the production of hydrogen and methane from magma chemistry and conditions—to be discussed shortly.
Fuels From Magma
[This section has been drawn primarily from a paper by C. J. M. Northrup Jr. of Sandia Laboratories, and published in the March 1978 issue of the Journal of Hydrogen Energy—it appears to be the latest work on this subject]
As mentioned earlier the Sandia Laboratory has been investigating the feasibility of extracting energy from buried magma chambers. Magma is the highest temperature geothermal heat resource known (600–1300 C) and is the ultimate heat source for all other geothermal resources. One exploitation strategy is to product steam for the generation of electric power using the heat of the magma. This follows the successful model of other geothermal steam sites that have no direct contact with magma. The Geysers geothermal site in northern California is the best commercial example. However, when we observe that nature produces hydrogen from wet volcanic magma it becomes valuable to consider a magma chamber as a high-pressure, high-temperature chemical process that can be utilized to produce more that just steam. Specifically basaltic magma in combination with water and biomass, at magma temperatures and pressures will produce hydrogen, natural gas and carbon monoxide.
“This method of fuels production in addition to steam depends principally on the chemical reducing action of basalt magma on injected water; this chemical interaction causes the oxidation of the ferrous components in the basalt and the production of hydrogen.”[3]
Temperature and pressure conditions: (600C 100mPa)
2FeO + H2O = 2FeO1.5 + H2
(Basalt)(Fluid) (Basalt)(Gas)
The amount of hydrogen produced by a given body of basalt can be enhanced by introducing natural organic matter (biomass) into the injected water. In addition the reaction, similar to coal gasification, will produce appreciable quantities of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and methane along with steam and hydrogen.
A good source of water mixed with biomass is sewage. One can envision a magma power plant taking in all the city sewage and producing electric power, some storable fuels such as natural gas and Carbon monoxide and turning back to the city usable water.
Figure 2. Magma Energy Utilization Process plant (Power Plant). This is an artistic rendition of what such a power plant might look like. It is likely that such a plant would use more than one well tapped into the magma. The picture on the right shows that the magma body is estimated to be about 50 miles deep and probably circulating—hot to the top cooler to the bottom.
Figure 3. Molten and Partially Molten Magma Locations within 10 kilometers of the surface of the Earth identified by Sandia Laboratories, from USGS data.
