Can Geothermal Power in Iceland Thaw a Frozen Economy?

Iceland Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir has said the country still has two valuable natural resources that could help it climb out of the current crisis

“When I started in this industry in 1995, we produced under 50 megawatts of geothermal power, and today it’s 10 times that,” says Asgeir Margeirsson, CEO of Geysir Green Energy, which is a shareholder in one of the leading geothermal power companies in Iceland.

Domestically, several hundred more megawatts of geothermal power are set to come on line in the next few years and, owing to the excellent balance sheets of Iceland’s power companies, not even the nationalization of its banks, collapse of its currency, and impending indebtedness to the International Monetary Fund can stop it, Margeirsson says. (Nor has the economic crisis affected the highly experimental Iceland Deep Drilling Project, whose long-term goal is to dramatically increase the efficiency of existing geothermal fields.)

But Iceland’s plan to become the dominant player in global geothermal power production through financing such projects, on the other hand, is as dead as the 50 percent of the country’s livestock that were snuffed out by the eight million tons of sulfur dioxide- and fluorine-laced aerosol released by the volcanic Laki fissure in 1783.

Scientific American