Description of Location
Newberry Volcano is one of the largest and youngest volcanoes in the United States. It consists of over 400 individual volcanic vents, which, when combined, form a broad mounded landform referred to as a “shield volcano”. The Newberry shield, centered about 20 miles southeast of Bend, Oregon, covers an area in excess of 600 square miles. Davenport Power, and its partners lease over 40,000 acres (60+ square miles) of Bureau of Land Management leases. The leases are shown as pink on this map distributed by the BLM. The Newberry Geothermal Project is located on the western flank of Newberry Volcano, several miles from the Newberry crater, and outside of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, in an area that allows geothermal development.

Newberry Volcano is extremely “hot”. It has erupted at least 25 times in the last 10,000 years. The most recent eruption was 1,300 years ago and produced the Big Obsidian lava flow, which covers over a square mile near the volcano’s center.

Referred to as Newberry crater, the summit caldera is about 4.4 miles in diameter. Since the creation of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument in 1990, the Newberry crater is off limits for geothermal development, but is open for recreation. It contains two lakes separated by a young pumice cone. Hot springs and steam vent fumaroles can be found along the shore of both lakes where popular camp grounds abound.

The Newberry Geothermal Project is located on the western flank of Newberry Volcano, several miles from the Newberry crater in an area that allows geothermal development.


Project Description
Because project geologists anticipate temperatures above 400°F, the geothermal plant will use a flash steam system. The 120 MW project that will be built in phases until 2011. The first phase of 30 MW will come online in late 2009.

Steam generation: Hot water is flashed to saturated steam in a separator. The excess water is re-injected into the ground.

Power generation: The steam is piped to a condensing steam turbine generator. At the turbine outlet, low grade steam flows to a condenser where

it is cooled by a circulation system and wet cooling tower. Excess condensate from the cooling tower is re-injected into the ground through re-injection wells to continuously recharge the underground thermal resource.

Interconnection: The energy produced by the generator is stepped up to transmission voltage in transformers next to the plant. The electricity is then transported along a dedicated interconnection line to the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) interconnection point several miles west of the project. Once the power is in the BPA system, it flows to the California border.