The History of Lightning Dock KGRA: Identifying a Blind Geothermal Resource

Abstract

Lightning Dock KGRA (Figure 1), located on the east side of Animas Valley in Hidalgo county, New Mexico, was designated a Known Geothermal Resource Area (KGRA) on Februrary 1st, 1974 (Icerman and Parker, 1988). The geothermal anomaly was identified almost twenty years earlier, in 1956 by Kintzinger, when four agricultural wells drilled in 1948 were examined (Kintzinger, 1956; Elston et al., 1983). These wells had encountered 101.5°C water at depths less than thirty meters (Smith, 1978). The geothermal resource at Lightning Dock is considered a blind resource and is an intermediate to high temperature resource (Grant, 1978; Fleischman, 2006). The resource has been used commercially since 1977 by Burgett Geothermal Greenhouses Inc. and since 1995 by Americulture; however, power production has only recently been successful (Witcher et al., 2002; Dahal et al., 2012). Cyrq Energy brought a 4 MW power plant online and connected to the grid in December of 2013 and is working to expand their output to 10 MW (Cyrq, 2014).