Literally green, not shorthand for eco-friendly, Gaia-approved.
From E&E News' EnergyWire, June 24,
A mineral called glauconite is disrupting plans to install wind turbines at several sites off the U.S. coast.
A green mineral scattered along the Atlantic Ocean’s seafloor is the latest hurdle for President Joe Biden’s plan to jump-start the offshore wind industry.
Glauconite is sediment that resembles the green sand in a fish tank. But if pounded by pile drivers, it shatters to form a claylike layer.
Monopiles — hollow steel tubes driven deep into the seafloor to support turbine towers — often cannot be hammered through the thick paste, cutting off the cheapest and most widely preferred foundation for the first U.S. offshore wind farms.
“It’s almost like magic what happens when the monopile is driven through it,” said George Hagerman, an offshore wind expert at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “It all of a sudden becomes very, very, sticky, almost like plaster.”
Identified in several offshore wind lease areas in the north Atlantic, the mineral poses a growing hazard to offshore wind projects that already face high costs and razor thin margins. At least four wind lease areas off the coast of New England and New York — Beacon Wind, Empire Wind, New England Wind and Sunrise Wind — have all have grappled with glauconite.
The glauconite challenge piles pressure on the Biden administration, which has been falling behind on its goal to power 10 million homes with offshore wind power — that’s roughly 30,000 megawatts of offshore electricity — by the end of the decade because of economic headwinds facing the industry.
The Interior Department declined to comment on glauconite.
But Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said at a June 7 event in Annapolis, Maryland, that her department was “working around the clock to transition to clean energy.”
“Our administration has been laser focused on making what many of us thought impossible — a thriving and sustainable domestic offshore wind industry from coast to coast,” she said.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore energy development, declined an interview on the mineral. In a paper BOEM released last year, the bureau said that developers will “inevitably encounter” glauconite in their lease areas in the Atlantic Ocean and its properties pose “significant risks” to building offshore wind farms.
Several offshore wind developers have dealt with glauconite by eliminating turbine positions, a cheaper option than pioneering new drilling techniques or finding alternative foundations — but one that can cut down on a wind farm’s power output.
Moreover, with the scale of glauconite unknown, avoidance is not seen as a long-term solution. Developers and federal agencies are scrambling to learn more about the mineral, where it is deposited and how to put turbines in it.
“Developers [were] being very conservative and just eliminating positions that look like they are at high risk. But that’s turning into a lot of turbine positions,” said Hagerman, who is also a senior scientist at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography at Old Dominion University.
The U.S. Geological Survey is compiling all documented references of glauconite offshore, with plans to release a report and geographic information system (GIS) map later this year to help address a significant data gap about where the mineral exists. Developers are also researching pile driving in glauconite sands, an initiative led by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute.
Even as researchers gather new information about the green sand, it’s stoking frustration with officials trying to keep turbines out of some fisheries. Glauconite’s presence in several cases has restricted developers’ ability to avoid fish habitats....
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