Study of practical cycles for geothermal power plants. Final report

A comparison is made of the performance and cost of geothermal power cycles designed specifically, utilizing existing technology, to exploit the high temperature, high salinity resource at Niland and the moderate temperature, moderately saline resource at East Mesa in California's Imperial Valley. Only two kinds of cycles are considered in the analysis. Both employ a dual flash arrangement and the liberated steam is either utilized directly in a condensing steam turbine or used to heat a secondary working fluid in a closed Rankine (binary) cycle. The performance of several organic fluids was investigated for the closed cycle and the most promising were selected for detailed analysis with the given resource conditions. Results show for the temperature range investigated that if the noncondensible gas content in the brine is low, a dual flash condensing steam turbine cycle is potentially better in terms of resource utilization than a dual flash binary cycle. (The reverse is shown to be true when the brine is utilized directly for heat exchange.) It is also shown that despite the higher resource temperature, the performance of the dual flash binary cycle at Niland is degraded appreciably by the high salinity and its output per unit of brine flow is almost 20 percent lower than that of the steam turbine cycle at East Mesa. Turbine designs were formulated and costs established for power plants having a nominal generating capacity of 50 MW. Three cycles were analyzed in detail. At East Mesa a steam turbine and a binary cycle were compared. At Niland only the binary cycle was analyzed since the high CO/sub 2/ content in the brine precludes the use of a steam turbine there. In each case only the power island equipment was considered and well costs and the cost of flash separators, steam scrubbers and piping to the power plant boundary were excluded from the estimate