Geothermal in Japan

The exploitation of geothermal energy in Japan has been drawn up into a part of their sunlight program. But since most of major promising geothermal areas located in the region of the national garden, which were limited in the utilization of land, and along with the soaring of Japan Yuan, and lower price of petroleum and risk on initial investment, hampered the increment of the capacity of geothermal-powered electricity. According to the annual report in 1997 by Japan geothermal association, the installed capacity for geothermal generation was in 530MW until the end of fiscal year of 1996 (up to March 31, 1997), which only covered 0.2% of the total in the country; the goals to the year of 2010 is in a installed capacity of 2800MW, covering 1% of the total. The exploitation of geothermal energy saw considerable development activity. The projects undergoing include: to promote the general investigation of geothermal development; demonstration and experiment on small-sized dual circular power generation, development of flerry fracture type thermal reservoir exploration methods; investigation on deep-level thermal reservoir; to develop 10MW dual circular demonstration power station; development of MW grade system of geothermal field; development of hot dry rock power generation system; well-drilling of deep-level heat reservoir and development of its process and environmental investigation.