ABSTRACT
The most important economic aspect of geothermal energy, besides power, is the cost benefit. Countries need not depend on imported fuels thereby saving enormous amounts of money. While in the case of conventional energy sources, the source of energy has to be bought, which has tremendous effects on the power generation support systems – from generation to supply costs. Besides savings related to the fuel cost, geothermal energy can earn additional revenue through carbon savings. However due to prevailing tax structures in different countries, the cost of a geothermal project varies and hence the cost of power. This is true especially with respect to non-OECD countries which are using obsolete technologies to generate power and not adopting clean development mechanisms tomitigate CO2 emissions. Geothermal power projects have two major costs: capital cost: this includes the cost of the land or land lease cost, surface and subsurface exploration costs, site infrastructure development cost, power plant cost and 2) maintenance cost. Further, the composition of the geothermal fluids and the depth of the geothermal reservoir, which are site specific, and the temperature of the reservoir have a direct bearing on the cost of the project. High-enthalpy fluids and shallow reservoir depth reduce the cost of the project compared to high-enthalpy fluids and deeper reservoir depth. Now that geothermal technology is very mature, exploration and exploitation of low-enthalpy fluids at shallower depths are very cost effective (Chandrasekharam and Bundschuh, 2008).
