Touring a Geothermal Power Plant

Destination: Hellisheiði

















One of the perks of working for a company which designs geothermal power plants is being able to easily arrange a tour of their facilities. One such geothermal power plant is Hellisheiði (pronounced Het-lish-haiti), which is only about a 30 minute drive from Reykjavik. For some background on how these plants work, this is a nice and reasonably short video explanation.

Essentially, the deeper one digs into the Earth, the closer we get to the molten core and the hotter the rocks get. Iceland is unique because it sits directly on two tectonic plates (the American and Eurasian one), which means they don't have to drill very deep to get to the hot stuff. This makes geothermal energy much easier and cheaper here than most other places in the world.

Geothermal plants themselves don't look very exciting because not much of it is above ground. The majority of the money spent is on drilling and other subsurface activities. It is considered renewable because it's very clean and replenishes itself naturally (if one assumes the center of the Earth will always be hot). Normally there are no emissions of any kind, but on that day they were doing some additional testing.
This is actually just pure steam (water vapor), even though it looks like smoke. Notice the resemblance with all the other stuff in the background? The plant is essentially just emitting clouds.

Our guide decided to park the car at the end of one of the roads and hike us up to some of the natural geothermal vents in the area. Just to prove these plants really are located in remote areas...here's the only other signs of animal life we encountered along the way.
And here's what the geothermal vents themselves look like. Remember these are completely natural and in fact change whenever there is an earthquake (some close, new ones open). The steam coming out here is not pure, and contains small amounts of gases like methane (basically the same as natural gas) and hydrogen sulfide (which smells like rotten eggs). Lets just say you wouldn't want to bottle the scent for perfume...
I don't know what this vent had been eating lately, but it certainly seemed to have more than its fair share of stinky hydrogen sulfide!
We hiked up a little bit further and found this smaller (and less stinky) one near the top of the mountain.

More Hellisheiði pictures are posted here.