Forest destroyed, Kamojang geothermal power plant in danger
Tuesday, October 30 2001 - 02:05 AM WIB
Because of the forest clearing, water supply to geothermal wells drops by three to six percent per annum, and this automatically causes an increase in the power plant's operating cost because the operator has to pump additional water from nearby river to fill in the geothermal wells.
"To deal with the decrease of water supply, we pump water from river to our geothermal wells, and thus, the supply of water reaches enough level. For that, we need additional cost and investment," said Pertamina Geothermal Indonesia's resource and technology manager Sayogi Sudarman.
Sayogi, also a lecturer at the University of Indonesia, said the company had been trying to replant trees in the cleared forests but to no avail, as farmers around the forests cut them down again and plant the plot with tomatoes.
The economic crisis and the hardship of lives of people living around the forest have caused the farmers to be indifferent about the fate of the Kamojang power plant.
Besides reducing water supply, Sayogi said, the destruction of forests surrounding the power plant would also reduce the lifetime of the power plant from the original projection of 30 years in operation.
The people should also be educated about the importance of protecting their forest, so that the geothermal resources would be maintained, as geothermal could serve as an alternative energy source following the drop in oil and gas energy sources.
The use of geothermal, Sayogi said, has more advantages than the oil and gas as geothermal is renewable energy source and more environmentally-friendly.
Indonesia currently has geothermal energy sources that could be transformed into a total of 20,000 megawatts of electricity per day, the largest in the world. Of those total potentials, only 700 megawatts have been utilized. (*)