The Icelandic government intends to scale up a successful circular economy built around its geothermal resources and export its model to other countries looking to tap into their underground renewable energy sources.
Decades ago, “the country undertook the challenge of transitioning from fossil fuels to geothermal, and today Iceland gets more than 70% of all its energy from geothermal sources,” writes Energy Monitor. “According to Iceland’s National Energy Authority, that transition for home heating alone saves the country around 3.5% of its gross domestic product.”
The news story adds: “Just like their Viking ancestors, today’s Icelanders have embraced volcanic activity, harnessing Iceland’s abundant geothermal energy to renewably heat and power their homes and businesses.”
The Nordic country’s location at the boundary of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates offers it access to vast geothermal resources, which its energy companies have tried to use in an efficient, circular manner.
It started in the 1970s with HS Orka, Iceland’s largest privately-owned power producer, prompted by the vision of Albert Albertsson, who’d just recently graduated from university.
“Albertson recognized that a geothermal power plant has resources flowing in and resources flowing out, and he was very strong-minded about eliminating any form of waste,” Jóhann Snorri Sigurbergsson, HS Orka’s business development manager, told Energy Monitor.
Albertsson provided the early concept for Iceland’s “Resource Park,” where a cluster of sustainability- and circularity-oriented businesses use the resource streams coming from two HS Orka geothermal power plants, Svartsengi and Reykjanes.
HS Orka’s Resource Park currently includes 10 companies that focus on aquaculture, biotech, cosmetics, e-fuels, food, and tourism, writes Energy Monitor. The companies all make use of the different resource streams from power plant operations, including carbon dioxide, cold and hot water, electricity, lava-filtered seawater, mineral-rich geothermal fluid, and steam.
For example, the Blue Lagoon spa relies on geothermal water that HS Orka has already used to produce electricity and hot water. HS Orka also supplies carbon dioxide emitted naturally in the geothermal process to both the Blue Lagoon Research & Development Center to produce algae for cosmetics, and to an e-fuels company called Carbon Recycling, which adds the gas to hydrogen to create renewable methanol. Water and heat from the power plants are also routed to a biotechnology company’s research greenhouse, where it conducts stem cell research for cosmetics, biopharma, and cell-cultured meat.
after HS Orka draws and filters seawater to cool the machines at the power plants, increasing the water’s temperature from about 8° to around 35°C, four aquaculture companies near the exit pipe take advantage of that hot water.
“The biggest expense for inland fish farms is the pumping of seawater,” said Sigurbergsson, explaining that the temperature of the sea is an integral factor for the salmon growth rate. Heating up the seawater to 30°C increases the rate by 20 to 25%, he added—and now, one of the four facilities is set to become the largest inland salmon farm in the world.
The geothermal cluster strategy has also been embraced by Iceland’s second-largest power producer, ON Power, whose Geothermal Park has 103 hectares of dedicated space for businesses, writes Energy Monitor. Among them is Swiss company Climeworks, which uses direct air capture (DAC) technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it underground.
“Climeworks uses our hot water and electricity to power their DAC plant, and there is a circularity there: they get hot water from us, use it, and then bring it back and we reuse it,” said Helga Kristin Johannsdottir, business development manager at ON Power.
Iceland’s environment ministry is now looking to scale up the green industrial park model in the country, amd the government is also “actively looking to export the model to other parts of the world that have exploitable geothermal resources,” Energy Monitor says. “The U.S., Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey, and New Zealand were the top five geothermal power generation markets in 2021, according to GlobalData, and could be potential beneficiaries.”
The model could also fit countries that do not have typically exploitable geothermal resources, but may instead be able to use fracking techniques from the oil and gas industry to tap into their subterranean renewable energy.
“Geothermal is on the rise and will play an increasingly important role in the world’s energy transition,” said Nótt Thorberg, director of Green by Iceland, a local cooperation platform for climate issues and solutions.
“The combination of Icelandic models coupled with new technologies, including in heat pump application, and even heating and cooling storage underground, is opening up new opportunities.”
