Steaming Up: Geothermal Heating in Iceland

- [Interviewer] Iceland is a great example of what a small country can do with a very powerful renewable resource, in this case, the heat of the earth, to completely change their energy systems. - When I was a kid, over 80% of Iceland's energy, came from oil and coal. When my mother was young and was being brought up, the only use for geothermal here in Iceland, was to wash clothes. - And things have changed dramatically. - Of course! If you had told those people of my mother's generation that during my lifetime we would use the same resource to heat the houses in the country, they would have thought we were explaining a dreamworld. But this is really what happened, and it has happened mostly during my own lifetime. - [Interviewer] We're on what's called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. - Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is actually coming up here, on this very peninsula, we are in the middle of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. So all the high-temperature geothermal fields in Iceland are actually on this plate boundary. - So, in this Mid-Atlantic Ridge, we're basically bringing up the heat of the center of the earth. It's coming up and spreading, and so we're sitting right on the crest of that spreading. Iceland is right there, ideally positioned to access the heat. - Here you are just seeing natural phenomena on the surface, where steam is actually escaping through fractures, heating up the seawater and boiling on the surface. - Because of their location, Iceland can access an extraordinary amount of heat beneath the surface. To do this, they use equipment developed in the oil-industry. But here, they're drilling for hot water. So we're in the middle of a giant lava-field. What is this? - This is a geothermal well, 1,200-meters deep. - Is there a lot of pressure here? There are wells like this all over Reykjavik, the capital city. - This is one of our wells here in this geothermal field. We have eight wells in this field. And we are pumping water here to serve the people in Reykjavik with hot water for heating their houses. This where the water comes here, flows along this pipeline here to the main pumping station. So this is a schematic diagram of this pumping station. This temperature is 125 to 130 degrees, but when the water is distributed to the houses it's always 80 degrees. - Very cool. - Then we are distributing this water directly to the houses, so there's no heat exchangers, this is used directly, this water, into radiators. And then-- - Hot-water radiators. - Hot-water radiators like this one here. - Oh gotcha, okay. So there's nobody here? - No, this is all remote-controlled from our main office. - Very cool. So we saw the well-head this morning, it went into the pumping station. And that fills up these large tanks, which gets distributed to half of Reykjavik. - Yes, a portion with it. - And so the only energy being used is really the energy to distribute. The earth does all the heating. - Yes, that's right. So we are not burning any coals or oil. It's just natural hot water. - And there's been no people in the stations that we've seen. So it's low-maintenance, very clean, very efficient, no CO2. What's wrong with it? - Everything is good with it. -Everything is good. I'm coming to believe that. Iceland also gets a large portion of it's electricity from geothermal, which we explore in the film."