The Cairns Post

Hot Rock City a rival to the Alice?

Daniel Burdon

30Oct07

ANEW Central Australian city called %u2018%u2018Geothermia%u2019%u2019 could produce enough electricity to run Australia%u2019s
economy for a century, according to environmentalist Tim Flannery.

He spoke on American news program Democracy Now on Thursday night, discussing his plans for the energy-city.

He said: ‘‘... recently there’s been astonishing discoveries of massive reserves of heat energy in the earth’s crust (geothermal hot rocks).

‘‘One of the biggest is in Australia ... and I’ve proposed to our government that we try to exploit this clean and sustainable energy resource to run a lot of our heavy industrial needs, such as mineral processing.

‘‘We could have a new city in Central Australia I’ve sort of called Geothermia, you know, based around the use of this resource, and use rail to bring in minerals to be cleanly processed and shipped out.’’

Mr Flannery said he believed the oil and gas exploration company drilling in the proposed area would know by Christmas this year whether the city would be viable or not.

When asked about how long the city would produce energy for, Mr Flannery replied: ‘‘If you run the whole Australian economy on it, it will last at least a century.

‘‘And that’s the one deposit, you know.

‘‘There’s ten companies looking for more of these hot rocks in Australia.

‘‘So as we shift away from coal and take a medium to long-term view, we can’t just imagine the choices between clean coal technologies and nuclear.’’

The theory behind the geothermal system calls for hot rock deep below the ground to be drilled into and water pumped into the fissures and heated.