Affordable, Green Technology:

Using heat from oil and gas wells to make electricity

SMU’s renowned Geothermal Laboratory will share the blueprint for generating geothermal electricity from wastewater produced by oil and gas wells at a conference on the Dallas campus Nov. 3-4.

See more about the conference and its speakers.

Volatile petroleum prices, federal tax incentives and technology developments are feeding a surge of interest in co-production of geothermal energy from oil and gas wells.  The SMU conference is designed to bring business and landowners together with technical, operational and financial players to help incubate geothermal energy ventures.

The oil crisis of the 1970s fed intense interest in geothermal energy, but the technology available at the time required high heat sources, like California’s Geysers Field, or costly exploration work to find and reach hot rock buried deep beneath the earth. Interest in the large capital investment required of old-school geothermal production waned when the price of oil came back down.

But new technology developed in association with SMU research provides the capability to produce electricity using much lower water temperatures and smaller, less expensive, turbines that can easily be transported to locations. The technology delivers a cost-effective, environment-friendly alternative energy not dependant on weather variables.

Read more about geothermal energy research by Blackwell, the W. B. Hamilton Professor of Earth Sciences in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in SMU's Dedman College.