DOE EGS Overview

In 2009 the US Department of Energy (USDOE) Geothermal Technologies Program began an Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) project to investigate the process of enhancing high temperature geologic formations to provide commercial scale electric power generation.

As part of this effort, demonstration projects were initiated that were jointly funded by industry and DOE. One of the main components of the demonstration projects is to record local seismicity before during and after the injection of water into the hot rocks to provide information that may indicate the creation of permeable fractures as well provide information on the generation of any induced seismicity. Lawrence Berkeley National Labs Earth Sciences Division was funded to perform this EGS earthquake monitoring.

Current EGS sites include projects at:

• Desert Peak, Nevada: 10 stations. LBL EGS Desert Peak website
• Bradys Hot Springs, Nevada: 8 stations. LBL EGS Brady's Hot Springs website
• The Geysers, California (including the NW Geysers EGS project): LBL EGS Geysers website (Also see the NCEDC's historic Calpine/Unocal Geysers Network data)
• Raft River, Idaho: 8 stations. Operated by US Geothermal Inc. Raft River is about 7 miles due north of the Utah border, and 70 miles SW of Pocatello, ID. LBL EGS Raft River website
• New York Canyon, Nevada: 8 stations. This network of OYO GS-11D 4.5 Hz 3C geophones recorded on Reftek 130s is about 50 km from Fallon, NV. It operated from from Day 224, 2010 to Day 140, 2012, but the equipment has now been removed. The 24-bit data, sampled at 500 sps, were recorded locally on memory cards. They were returned to LBNL, where the data were analysed and archived. No earthquakes were found in the recordings.
• Newberry Caldera, Oregon: 15 stations. LBL EGS Newberry Caldera website Data is sent via cell phone to Seattle where the operator (AltaRock) processes the data, and triggers are sent to LBL.

The NCEDC is archiving both event and waveform data that is being generated from each of the DOE demonstration sites data and providing it to the public. For most EGS projects, data are sent from each station by spread spectrum radios (900 Mhz) to a central site. Each trigger is then sent to LBNL where it is processed. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has the responsibility to collect the data, assemble event data from each of the sites to be archived (waveforms, locations, times metadata, etc) and transfer it to the NCEDC. The annual volume of data archived is expected to be on the order a terabyte per year from the 100,000 events per year.

You can get the EGS data at:

• EGS Earthquake Catalog Search
• EGS Waveform Request Form (EVT_FAST format)

All archived EGS data from this project will be freely available to the public and research community through this site. In addition to this NCEDC web site LBNL maintains a public website that shows real time results in map form for each of the demonstration sites.

More information about the EGS project can be found at the LBLN EGS web site.

Typical Station Equipment

Newberry Caldera Station Equipment