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How Kenya is harnessing the immense heat from the Earth

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(Image credit: Jacob Kushner)

By Jacob Kushner 4th March 2021

In the volcanic region of East Africa's Great Rift Valley, tectonic shifts are tearing
the continent apart – and releasing unimaginable quantities of clean energy.

Article continues below

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 rive along the dusty dirt road that winds through Kenya's Hell's Gate National

D park, past the zebra, gazelles and giraffes, and you'll see a plume of steam
shooting skyward in the distance. Vehicles must sometimes swerve to avoid
running over warthogs as they enter a vast valley dotted with dozens of steam
vents – a factory of clouds.

Blasts of steam billow loudly, releasing heat from deep within the Earth. But even more
powerful is the steam you don't see: that which twists through miles of tubes to push past
turbines, generating a type of clean energy that won't run out for millions of years.

Atop this infernal labyrinth of tubes is Kenya's Olkaria Geothermal Project, where a new
addition to the powerplant is about to go online. At 86 megawatts, the Olkaria VI expansion
will push the project's total production to 791.5 megawatts. That's about 27% of all the
energy in Kenya, according to KenGen, the parastatal company that operates Olkaria.
Already, Kenya relies on geothermal steam for 38% of its power – a greater proportion than
any other nation.

"When Olkaria VI is complete, it will be the largest single geothermal plant in the world,"
according to Cyrus Karingithi, who leads infrastructure and resource development for
Olkaria.

Globally, geothermal energy is a $4.6bn (£3.3bn) industry, with more than 500 powerplants
electrifying millions of households across South-east Asia, North America, Europe and
beyond. Geothermal is, aer all, the second most abundant source of energy in the world
behind solar.

But it in terms of how much we tap this source of power, geothermal lags well behind. In
2016, the energy the world harvested from geothermal was just 4% that from solar,
despite geothermal having some important advantages. Wind turbines are useless on a still
day, and solar panels' energy falls when the sun is covered by clouds and at night.
Meanwhile, no matter the time of day, the Earth below us is steadily releasing vast
quantities of heat, whatever the weather.

This is where the continent is breaking up – Anna Mwangi

To appreciate the potential of this heat, there is nowhere better to look than where it blasts
through the surface in the towers of steam erupting from Hell's Gate, around 90 kilometres
(56 miles) north-west of Kenya's capital, Nairobi.

Heat from the depths

On cloudy days here, it's hard to tell which clouds come from the sky, and which ones come
from the ground. One morning in February, Anna Mwangi, a geophysicist who works for
firms including KenGen, is tasked with exploring for new geothermal drill sites. She points
at a faint whisp of steam rising from a small hole in the rocky hillside.

"You can boil an egg in it," she says with a smile. The area around Olkaria is teeming with
natural geothermal vents such as these, some hot enough they burn to the touch. The
steam, Mwangi explains, is what gives Hell's Gate National Park its name: The landscape
looks like the underworld is boiling over.

This energy is coming from the Earth – and it's essentially

limitless – Juliet Newson
In a way, it is. Some 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) down lies the Earth's core, with
temperatures hotter than the surface of the Sun. That heat travels upward through the
Earth's thick mantle, to the planet's outermost layer – the crust. In places where tectonic
plates – consisting of the Earth’s crust, and the upper mantle – are being pushed together or
torn apart, this heat rises closer to the surface. One such place is Africa's Great Ri Valley,
which runs 7,000km (4,350 miles) across the eastern side of the continent.

"This is where the continent is breaking up," says Mwangi, gesturing to the rocky ridges with
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deep gorges in between them. These are the visible signs of two vast tectonic plates slowly
 inching apart. "This is an active process that will go on for several millions of years to come,"
she says. "In some millions of years if you come here, this will be an ocean."

But in the meantime, this tectonic movement can be exploited for the energy it releases. As
tectonic plates move they cause fissures – breaks in the Earth's crust that allow
underground water to interact with super-heated rock, turning it into steam. These fissures
create pathways up to the Earth's surface, where they form hot springs, geysers or steaming
geothermal vents. Here in the Great Ri Valley, much of that heat is trapped just beneath
the surface.

"This energy is coming from the Earth – and it's essentially limitless," says Juliet Newson,
director of the Iceland School of Energy at Reykjavik University. "Kenya has got a really
good resource and that's the Ri Valley. You've got this [incredible] heat that's so near the
surface." In other parts of the world, you'd have to drill several kilometers or more to find
equivalent temperatures.

In East Africa's Great Ri Valley, continental tectonic plates are slowly moving apart (Credit:
Alamy)

Harnessing this energy for electricity is very simple, says Karingithi. "The way we do it at
Olkaria, you separate the water from the steam. The steam you take to the turbine, which
rotates and generates electricity."

The turbines at Olkaria V whirl at 3,000 rotations per minute, too fast for the human eye to
follow. Inside a small control room, two engineers work in 12-hour shis, staring at a dozen
monitors with data from the plant.

Kenya started early. We explored from the 1950s, so we've

had many decades of studies and development and successes
– Anna Mwangi
"What is your output today?" Karingithi asks them. One consults a computer screen: "158
megawatts." That's about 5% of the electricity capacity in the country.

All told, Olkaria generates about a quarter of Kenya's power, transmitting some of it nearly
500km (310 miles) south-east to Kenya's port city of Mombasa, and a few hundred
kilometers west toward the border with Uganda. Kenya is the eighth largest producer of
geothermal energy in the world, behind nations such as the United States, the Philippines,
Indonesia, Turkey and New Zealand. Already ahead of Iceland and Japan, it is set to overtake
Mexico and Italy once Olkaria VI goes live.

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 Steam has been tapped for power at Hell's Gate for more than 70 years (Credit: Jacob Kushner)

This legacy has been a long time in the making. "Kenya started early," says Mwangi. "We
explored from the 1950s, so we've had many decades of studies and development and
successes."

And also failures. "Our first wells were terrible," says Mwangi. "That was in 1956. Those wells
produced low-pressure steam," says Karingithi, and at the time, the technology wasn't
developed enough to use that steam.

The original Olkaria – Kenya's first geothermal power plant, and the first in Africa – came a
quarter of a century later, in 1981. Since the 1950s, KenGen, the parastatal company that
operates Olkaria, has drilled 310 wells here in Hell's Gate, 125 of which are still steaming
today. Two massive new power plants came online in 2014 and 2015, substantially
increasing output.

But their work is far from over. A quarter of Kenya's population still lacks electricity.
Blackouts are common, hampering the nation's manufacturing sector and making it hard for
students who need to study at night or parents to charge their cell phones. "We need to add
more power so our nation is lighted like the rest of the world," says Karingithi.

Drillling down

To find the next sources of steam, Mwangi and Karingithi trek as much as 50 kilometers (31
miles) in a single day. They look for sprigs of what they call "geothermal grass" – tall and
thin, with green and yellow strands, which hint that heat and moisture may be lying
underneath. They collect rock samples, test the water and take the temperature of the
ground, all of which feeds into their calculations of whether a new well should be drilled in
any particular spot.

Once you identify a strong location, "you need investors not to be faint-hearted", says
Karingithi. "Drilling a well costs $6m [£4.3m]. And if you miss, you're sunk." That is the major
disadvantage of geothermal, he says. "The capital investment is very high and it puts off
many people."

For many geothermal engineers, the most exciting moment comes when you drill a new well
– and strike steam. "When you drill a well they open the valve and let the fluid discharge into
the atmosphere, the noise and the shaking is incredible – it's just absolutely amazing," says
Newson, of what's called a vertical discharge test. "The power that comes out of that well –
for 20 years – that's so exciting!"

At Olkaria, wells are tested for about two months to measure their flow rate. Then, the
steam is directed either into an on-site mini plant, or through tubes to a larger plant such as
Olkaria VI. Because Hell's Gate is home to so much wildlife, in some places the pipes must
be lied several metres above the ground to allow giraffes and other wildlife to pass safely.
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 Geothermal may require less land use than other forms of power, but it has still displaced
communities in Kenya's Hell's Gate region (Credit: Jacob Kushner)

At Olkaria, some of the electricity is generated right at the well sites. These small satellite
wells tend to be two to three kilometers deep, each producing about 5 megawatts of energy
– enough to power 50,000 Kenyan homes. 

As the steam powers the turbines, the water gets injected back into the ground, to make
sure the steam wells never run dry. With time it will reheat and return once more as steam.

Steaming ahead

In a country where demand for power outstrips supply, geothermal plants have a few
advantages. For one, they can expand quickly. At Olkaria, "the pilot plant took maybe a year
to build. The next 14 [wells] were built in four years," says Victoria Nyaga, one of Newson’s
former students who is now a sustainable energy engineer and who helped design some
power plants at Olkaria. "It's really fast-rolling once you get going."

Their size helps too. The small plants that sit upon the wells are less than a football pitch in
size and can be dismantled and moved from one well to another when more powerful steam
sources are found. "That is a major advantage of geothermal – it requires a very small
footprint," says Karingithi. Geothermal requires significantly less land than wind, solar or
coal.

That said, a single geothermal well may be tiny, but 300 of them spread across a valley
crisscrossed by tubes and transmission lines, access roads and injection pools, makes
Olkaria a behemoth. This poses a problem for the pastoralist Maasai who have grazed their
cattle across this land on and off for centuries.

To make way for Olkaria's expansions, Kengen relocated 1,181 Maasai from 155 households
to a 1,700 acre stretch of land outfitted with houses, churches and schools. "We hope to get
the next generation of scientists and engineers from [that same, Maasai] community," says
Karingithi.

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 Those who rely on tourism in the Hell's Gate region have concerns that expanding geothermal
power might disrupt their livelihoods (Credit: Jacob Kushner)

So far, Olkaria employs 1,250 people but only about 50 are Maasai, and only 20 hail from
the community that was displaced. Not many Kenyans have the opportunity to attend
university, least of all rural pastoralists. Now, some of the 500 Maasai families who live
around Suswa crater to Olkaria's south worry they'll soon be forced out, too. Another
geothermal company has begun scouting for geothermal potential around the crater,
formed by a now inactive volcano. The company believes the Suswa crater has the potential
to generate 750 megawatts of geothermal electricity – as much as Olkaria produces today.

"In Olkaria, those people have been chased away," says Kiano Sempui, a Maasai man and
father of three who lives and grazes goats, sheep and cows at Suswa. "We are very sure that
when the company comes here, sooner or later, the same will happen to us."

What's more, Sempui fears that geothermal would disrupt the small tourism industry he's
worked so hard to create. On weekends, dozens of Kenyan and foreign tourists head up the
crater to visit a labyrinth of natural caves, hike along the crater rim for stunning views of the
forest below them where leopards live, and to camp under the stars at the edge of a cliff.
The conservancy's tourism revenue pays teachers' salaries, hospital bills and repairs roads.

"When the geothermal comes up, the conservancy will be destroyed, because there aren't
many tourists who will want to put up with all that noise," says Sempui, in reference to the
mind-shattering billowing of steam that erupts from geothermal wells when they are being
tested or undergoing maintenance.

Closing the loop

As governments and foreign investors spend billions of dollars to connect more of East
Africa to the grid, concern for rural pastoralists' land is one of several challenges that will
need to be addressed as people turn to geothermal to meet the energy demands of the
region's rapidly growing cities.

Another challenge is how to handle the CO2 released by the geothermal fluids and that can
occur naturally in hot springs and steam vents. The amount of carbon released by
geothermal varies widely from one project to the next, but overall it is still miniscule
compared with burning fossil fuels – just 2.7% as much as burning coal, or 5% as much as
natural gas.

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 Geothermal firms in Iceland have sequestered the CO2 released by injecting it deep underground
to form chalky white minerals (Credit: Sandra O Snaebjornsdottir)

Some plants, such as projects in Iceland, capture the carbon and inject it back underground,
where it mineralises and becomes harmless. “A project in Iceland, called Carbfix, has been
researching this for the last 10 years, and now a large proportion of CO2 from the large
Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Station is reinjected deep into the basalt rocks where it forms
new minerals which become part of the rocks,” says Newson. (Read more about how Iceland
is turning CO2 into stone)

More problematic than the CO2, perhaps, is the reinjection of water deep into the rocks to
replenish the steam. The water reinjected “has high concentrations of silica and salts
[relative to cold groundwater], and sometimes toxic elements, such as arsenic, lithium,
antimony, mercury, sulfur, and many others,” says Newson. In most cases, the water is
injected deep enough that it doesn’t interfere with aquifers, but if done wrong it has the
potential to pollute sources of drinking water.

And then there is the fact that through fracturing rocks, geothermal engineering can, and
regularly does, cause seismic activity. On rare occasions, "you can feel the earthquakes. And
people don't like that," says Newson. "That generates a lot of distrust and a lot of 'not in my
backyard,' for which you can't blame people."

Although infrequent, sometimes the earthquakes are more serious. In November 2017, a
geothermal plant caused a 5.5 magnitude earthquake in Pohang, South Korea that le
1,700 people displaced when water injections fractured a previously unknown fault line.
Better monitoring and risk management could help avoid large earthquakes like this in
the future.

Digging deep

Because geothermal electricity is only a little more than a century old, unlike fossil fuels,
its future will most likely be longer than its past. But there's much disagreement over what
the next frontier should be. 

Most existing geothermal plants "require a moderately hot reservoir – hot springs, geysers
and other geothermal features," says Newson. These are in essence the "low-hanging fruit"
of geothermal.

"Anywhere you go, if you drill into the Earth deep enough, it's pretty hot," says Newson. "So
why don't we drill deep, fracture it, and get the heat out? It's really tempting. Drilling is fun!
But honestly, it's really hard to make it work. It's hard to get the rocks to fracture in the right
direction."

For example, one deep drilling initiative in Iceland that goes around 4.6km (2.9 miles) down
Future Planet has met some tough challenges. "There's some harsh chemistry involved, and theMenu
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 equipment is all getting destroyed," says Nyaga. The geothermal fluids dissolve gases such
as CO2 that come from the underlying magma. And with temperatures surpassing 400C,
these fluids also dissolve minerals out of the rocks. This makes the fluids highly corrosive,
and they can cause damage to metal drilling equipment, pipes and cement that holds the
equipment in place.

Geothermal energy might be most prominent in areas with hot springs and geysers, but even in
cooler climes it can provide significant clean energy (Credit: Alamy)

While some engineers race to drill deeper, others think it better to cool off. So-called low-
temperature geothermal systems with smaller outputs can be developed inexpensively in
places where big powerplants cannot.

Already, "China is one of the top nations for geothermal heat," says Nyaga, and many other
countries are experimenting with new ways to generate power from water barely warm
enough to brew your tea.

In theory, geothermal power can be produced virtually anywhere you can drill deep enough
to release it. Newson says it might someday even be possible to produce geothermal power
from the bottom of the sea. Since most of Earth's volcanic activity occurs in the middle of
the oceans, where tectonic plates converge or collide, the water there is plenty hot enough
to power a turbine.

While Kenya leads Africa as far as tapping geothermal power, the same geological features
that power Olkaria exist in half a dozen other nations up and down the Great Ri. Already,
KenGen operates 22 wells in Ethiopia and will soon be tapping steam in Djibouti, too.

Across the globe, opportunities for geothermal power exist wherever tectonic plates collide.
Many of these sites are in the Global South. "East Africa and Asia – there's a lot of potential
in the Philippines and Indonesia," says Nyaga.

But while these regions might have the most accessible hot geothermal energy, the growing
technical expertise in low-temperature geothermal means that more or less anywhere you
stand in the world, you don't have to look far to find evidence of the immense power of the
Earth's heat. 

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