Courier Mail
Thursday 22/1/2009 Page: 69
HOT rocks explorer Panax Geothermal geothermal has reported an inferred resource of 41,000 petajoules at its Penola tenement in South Australia. The company said 5% of the inferred resource could be classified as a measured resource sufficient to operate a 200MW geothermal base-load power plant for 30 years, subject to a full feasibility study. Panax Geothermal aims to have Australia's first grid-connected geothermal power plant operational by 2011.
Its application for a $7 million drilling grant from the Federal Government had also been upgraded to a full merit assessment, executive director Kerry Parker said. Mr Parker said the group was "quietly confident" of grant approval which would see drilling at Salamander-1 in the advanced Penola Project, part of the company's limestone Coast geothermal project in SA, start by mid-2009.
He said Panax Geothermal was the only hot sedimentary aquifer project in Australia to reveal a measured resource, highlighting Panax Geothermal's advanced status. (Hot fractured rock explorer GeoDynamics has Australia's most advanced project near Innamincka in the state's far north.) "The measured resource is quite significant. The small amount of measured resource more than clearly demonstrates the advanced nature of the project," Mr Parker said.
The company would proceed, either with a grant or alternative funding, with production tests. It aims to make Salamander-1 part of a 5-10MW grid connected, commercial geothermal power plant up and running by 2011. The Penola project had excellent access to infrastructure, with the main National Electricity Market Management Company grid traversing the entire project area, it said.
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