Management of Significant Environmental Aspects of Geothermal Projects

Abstract

The growing energetic demand in El Salvador makes necessary the development of new projects for electricity generation, which according to the technologies currently developed can come from sources such as: gas, petroleum, coal, hydro, solar biomass and geothermal. The energetic projects development must be indubitable accompanied by the environmental protection, it means that the environmental aspects of each type of electricity generation must be carefully studied as a part of the environmental assessment process. As a result of this report, it is concluded that even though geothermal projects include some activities that can cause negative environmental impacts, the experience worldwide and that gained in El Salvador has allowed LaGeo to learn about the management of the environmental aspects such that they do not represent a risk of causing significant negative impacts to the environment, reflecting this in an exemplar environmental performance.