Graduate students Travis Brown (Hydrology) and Kamran Bakhsh (Mining Engineering) received first place as the winning team in the 2014 Geothermal Case Study Challenge, sponsored by the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Last semester, Brown and Bakhsh worked with Mining Engineering Professor Masami Nakagawa to gather geothermal data on the Waunita Hot Springs Geothermal Area in Gunnison, Colorado. They published their case studies on OpenEi.org, a Wiki for energy information.
“Waunita has some of the higher geothermal potential in the state and right now there are not any geothermal power plants in Colorado,” Brown said. “Part of our interest in doing this site was to complie research that may be 2-3 decades out of date and hope enough people would be interested to conduct more recent exploration there.” As part of the award, Brown was able to attend the Geothermal Resource Council's 38th Annual Meeting, the largest geothermal conference in North America.
Both students learned how to organize research on an open source domain website and to apply exploration techniques to finding geothermal resources.
Their data collection can be found at OpenEi.
Contact:
Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator, Colorado School of Mines / 303-273-3088 / kmorton@mines.edu
Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations, Colorado School of Mines / 303-273-3541 / kgilbert@mines.edu
