Basel's Deep Heat project, December 2006
Update 11:35 Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Basel’s innovative geothermal energy project made world headlines when it was begun in 2001, but the city suffered a series of tremors in December 2006 that prompted fears the deep drilling may have triggered the earthquakes. The Deep Heat Mining project, designed to pull energy from the deep bedrock, was closed temporarily in early 2007, but Thursday 11 December canton Basel City officials announced that the project has officially closed.
The head of the Geothermal Explorers next week faces charges in Basel, and 20 Minutes reports that there is widespread surprise in the region that he is the only person who will have to answer criminal charges and that no cantonal or city officials have been charged in the affair.
Insurance claims against the project came to CHF9 million, reports swissinfo, but the project has ended, the official report published Thursday notes, because risk analyses have suggested further drilling could set off more earthquakes.
Three tremors, all over three on the Richter scale, and all of them centred at the mining site, occured between 8 December 2006 and 16 January 2007. Drilling had stopped in early January. The company, Geothermal, and Basel authorities said at the time that a lengthy risk analysis was needed before drilling could resume.
Switzerland has 300-400 earthquakes a year, with 3-4 that register over 3 on the Richter scale. Basel sits on a seismic fault.
The project has implications for a major energy project in the US, according to the New York Times, which writes that “The report comes as the United States Energy Department is preparing its own review of the safety of a closely related project, by a start-up company called AltaRock Energy, in the hills north of San Francisco. The AltaRock project is the Obama administration’s first major test of advanced geothermal energy.”
Background: Cleantech, Swissinfo
Links to other sites: Geothermal Explorers, Swiss Seismological Service (Ger), Swissinfo
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 11 December 2009.
Filed under: Business
Tags: Basel, canton Basel City, Deep Heat Mining project, earthquakes, geothermal, geothermal energy, Geothermal Explorers, Richter scale, Switzerland, tremors
December 12th, 2009 at 9:08 am
[...] administration’s efforts to find alternative energy supplies. The move comes just a day after Switzerland’s geothermal project in Basel was shut down permanently, following earthquakes at the site in 2006 and early [...]
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:53 am
[...] Background, GenevaLunch [...]
April 9th, 2010 at 10:09 am
[...] Alps, where the German effort and the ended Swiss effort at Basel are located the Africa plate is sliding under Europe. The Alps are going up and there’s going to [...]