The initial term is 12 months, with the option to renew for three additional one-year terms. Administering the program would principally require the environmental consultant to develop a sampling and analysis plan, conduct hydrologic sampling and monitoring activities, and submit biannual and annual data report summaries. (Ormat), and consists of four units, G1, G2, G3 and Casa Diablo IV (CD4). This complex is operated by Ormat Nevada Inc. The County of Mono, California, is seeking a qualified environmental consulting firm to administer a defined hydrologic data collection and monitoring program to be conducted in connection with a geothermal complex located in Mammoth Lakes, California. Hard copies may be requested at a later date. "Despite 18 pages of comments and signatures from local citizens, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Inyo, no meaningful mitigation measures were included in the final federal environmental documents," said Wentworth.* Due to adverse weather conditions and road closure we will accept digital submittals. Tree kills and increased ground temperatures have also been reported.ĭespite such concerns having been expressed in public comments on the project's Environmental Impact Statement, the project was approved without taking local concerns into account, said John Wentworth of the Mammoth Lakes Trails and Public Access Foundation, a local landscape protection group. "Respected experts from the hydrogeological consulting field, including a former employee of the USGS, have voiced strong concerns to the MCWD that the environmental review process did not adequately address the potential adverse consequence to the District's groundwater field," said Rick Wood, mayor of the Town of Mammoth Lakes.Īccording to a press release issued last week by MCWD, previous Ormat projects in the area have also resulted in poorer air quality in the region, including heightened levels of the extremely poisonous gas hydrogen sulfide.
For the last two years, with spring snowmelt much reduced, the water district has been forced to increase its reliance on pumping as its surface water sources like Mammoth Creek have dwindled.Īnd both MCWD and the town government charge that the BLM's Environmental Impact Statement for the Casa Diablo IV Project gave short shrift to local concerns over the town's water supply. That would mean less potable groundwater within reach of MCWD's wells.
The Mammoth Community Water District (MCWD), which serves the resort town of 8,000 or so residents with drinking water and wastewater services, has expressed concerns that reinjecting cooler water into the geothermal aquifer might reduce pressure in that aquifer, resulting in a drawdown of the cold water aquifer above it. But the reinjected geothermal water will be much cooler. Most of the water pumped by Ormat will be reinjected into the geothermal aquifer, so that aside from losses to steam and leakage, the actual volume of water in the hot aquifer may not change by much. Ormat Technologies' Casa Diablo IV Geothermal Energy Project would draw 29,000 acre-feet of extremely hot water per year from deep within the rock layers of the tectonically active region, using up to 16 newly drilled wells.īut that geothermally heated aquifer lies beneath the cold water aquifer from which Mammoth Lakes draws its drinking water, and locals are worried that the Ormat's pumping could draw down the cold water aquifer: a troubling prospect in this drought as locals become increasingly dependent on groundwater. Forest Service has the town of Mammoth Lakes worried about its drinking water supply. Natural hot springs in the Mammoth Lakes area hint at the region's geothermal potential | Photo: clickfarmer/Flickr/ Creative Commons LicenseĪ 33-megawatt geothermal power plant approved in August by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S.
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