In an announcement following DOE allocations, “Caldera Geothermal Inc. (“Caldera” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce that its wholly owned subsidiary Geothermal Technical Partners Inc. has won a grant for $1,609,275 for exploration at the Company’s flagship McGee Mountain property.

The proceeds will be used for the following exploration stages: To integrate data from a previous survey conducted by Caldera using the innovative 2 meter shallow temperature survey technique with further exploration; Use additional innovative technologies which Caldera is pioneering for use in geothermal exploration to enhance location specific water sampling and obtain temperature gradient information prior to actual temperature gradient drilling; Conduct a gravity survey; Conduct two rounds of temperature gradient drilling; Drill two deep slim holes.

Altogether, the grant will assist Caldera to further define the relationship between thermal anomalies detected at surface and deep geothermal reservoirs and ultimately to discover a significant geothermal resource at McGee Mountain.

Geothermex has previously estimated a resource capacity of 19.5MW with 90% probability, 47MW with 50% probability and a most likely estimate of 28MW. The estimates are based on heat in place using assumptions on the potential characteristics of the reservoir derived from comparable and proximate geothermal reservoirs and historical temperature gradient and other exploration data.

Richard Zehner, President & CEO of Caldera stated, “We are very pleased to have received this grant under the Innovative Exploration Technologies category, and to be given the opportunity to further demonstrate the technologies and approach that Caldera is championing. The data collected so far suggests McGee Mountain is among the best undeveloped geothermal projects in Nevada and we are looking forward to moving the project forward towards proving this resource.”

Mr Zehner further added, “We are also excited to be given assistance to continue to experiment with adopting other technologies to geothermal exploration. This fits into Caldera’s philosophy of using cost-effective techniques to gain more robust information prior to drilling, to mitigate financial and technical risk in the initial exploration stages, and ultimately increase probability of drilling success.”

Source: Company release via EarthTimes