The Santa Rosa – Geysers recharge project, Geysers geothermal field

ABSTRACT The Santa Rosa -Geysers Recharge Project (SRGRP) is a public-private collaboration that is bringing 42,000 m 3 per day of tertiary-treated municipal wastewater via a 65-km pipeline for injection at the 750-mw Calpine portion of the Geysers geothermal field. Since start-up in November 2003, over 11 million m 3 have been delivered and injected, as of August 31, 2004. This amounts to a 40% increase over pre-SRGRP injection rates. Reservoir modeling and experience with previous injection suggest that incremental steam production derived from the SRGRP injection will gradually increase and peak after three years at approximately 42% of the mass injection rate, yielding 85 gross mw, or 76 mw net of the 9 mw used to pump the wastewater to the injection wells. The benefit is calculated relative to the declining fieldwide production trend that would be expected without SRGRP. Early results are consistent with this projection, indicating a net benefit of approximately 16 mw after eight months of SRGRP injection (relative to the projected generation trend without SRGRP). Initial results from a tracer study showed recovery of 10% of the injected tritium slug within an eleven-week sample window. Analyses of non-condensible gases (NCG) in produced steam shows concentrations decreasing by as much as 70% in production wells in the high-NCG northwestern portion of the field. The project Environmental Impact Report (EIR) studied the possibility of increased seismicity induced by the increased injection. The study concluded that the effects on nearby residents would be "less than significant", because the induced seismicity is almost entirely in the form of microearthquakes that are detected by seismological instruments but not felt by people. After ten months of SRGRP operation, the results have been consistent with the EIR projections. Activity in the magnitude range 1.5 to 3.0 is up 29% compared with pre-SRGRP seismicity, but there has actually been a slight decrease in the occurrence rates of earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 and greater

Mobile phone parenting: Reconfiguring relationships between Filipina migrant mothers and their left-behind children

The Philippines is an intensely migrant society with an annual migration of one million people, leading to over a tenth of the population working abroad. Many of these emigrants are mothers who often have children left behind. Family separation is now recognized as one of the social costs of migration affecting the global south. Relationships within such transnational families depend on long-distance communication and there is an increasing optimism among Filipino government agencies and telecommunications companies about the consequences of mobile phones for transnational families. This article draws on comparative research with UK-based Filipina migrants - mainly domestic workers and nurses - and their left-behind children in the Philippines. Our methodology allowed us to directly compare the experience of mothers and their children. The article concludes that while mothers feel empowered that the phone has allowed them to partially reconstruct their role as parents, their children are significantly more ambivalent about the consequences of transnational communication

Diasporic Dreams, Middle Class Moralities and Migrant Domestic Workers among Muslim Filipinos in Saudi Arabia

This paper is about middle-class Muslim Filipinos in Saudi Arabia and their discourses about and relationships with migrant domestic workers. Saudi Arabia is not simply a temporary stopping point to a better future elsewhere, but is also a place where the middle-class aspirations of Muslim Filipinos may be realised and where their religious affiliations as Muslims may be seen as enhancing rather than detracting from those dreams and imaginings. As part of a large and diverse diasporic community, middle-class Filipinos routinely interact and socialise with working-class Filipinos. They often provide succour and support for their compatriots who labour under difficult and legally unprotected conditions. Some employ migrant domestic workers in their homes, many of whom are irregular or takas (escapees). At the same time, they reproduce and reinforce many of the gendered stereotypes of domestic workers that often suggest moral failings of one sort or another. The simultaneous embracing of and distancing from domestic workers reflects the anxieties of those, particularly women, whose tenuous hold of middle-class status is accomplished through, but also put at risk by, the precariousness of their sojourns abroad in the Kingdom

Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys: Ritual, Normativity and the Religious Imagination Among International Asian Migrant Women

This issue highlights recent ethnographic work that discloses migrant women’s creative engagements with the people and landscapes in the places they migrate to. We challenge a dominant view that construes women international migrants from Asia as docile bodies shaped and constrained by their transnational (re)productive labours. And we reject simplistic contemporary formulations of transnational migration that posit a singular, homogeneous ‘transnational social field’. Three key processes, relatively ignored and under theorised are interrogated: diaspora formation, ritual performance and changing normativities. A focus on diaspora encourages us to move beyond a political and economic analysis to consider cultural practices, continuities and discontinuities in migrants’ relationships with the people and places they travel to, as well as those left behind. A focus on ritual emphasises the significance of religious performance in the making of place and convivial sociality. A focus on normativity foregrounds the ways that people’s affective relationships are performatively reworked and transgressed within and across discrepant diasporic spaces

Adding adsorption to a geothermal simulator

Physical adsorption of steam has increasingly become recognized as an important storage mechanism in vapor dominated geothermal reservoirs. A method has been developed which allows the effects of adsorption to be modeled using TETRAD, a commercially available geothermal simulator. The method consists of replacing the standard steam table with a new steam table which has been derived to include adsorptive effects. The TETRAD simulator, when run with the pseudo steam table, approximately matches the pressure, production, and saturation behavior of a desorbing geothermal system. Adsorption can be described as the existence of an immobile layer of liquid on the surfaces within a porous medium. The presence of an adsorbed liquid water layer in rocks has been shown experimentally to cause the vapor pressure of steam to be lower than its flat surface vapor pressure for a particular The pseudo steam table accounts for this vapor pressure lowering effect. A test run was made with TETRAD using the pseudo steam table and a low porosity, low permeability reservoir matrix. This test run was compared to an equivalent run made with Stanford Geothermal Program's simulator, ADSORB. The program ADSORB is a one dimensional simulator which has adsorption effects built into its difference equations. The comparison of these runs shows that the pseudo steam table allows TETRAD to match the behavior of the ADSORB simulator. Injection was not investigated in this study. A convenient method of modeling adsorption with TETRAD is to use standard steam tables while allowing for the vapor pressure lowering effect of adsorption. This will require modifications of the equations in the code that describe the partial pressure of the steam phase