Site preparation work is under way at Chevron’s field in Coalinga, California, where 3,800 heliostats, each with two flat mirrors, will be installed across 40 hectares of land. The mirrors focus the sun’s energy on a boiler atop a central tower generating steam to inject into the well bore.

Coalinga produces a heavy oil. Injecting steam makes the oil less viscous and easier to extract, says Kim Copelin, spokesperson for Chevron Technology Ventures (CTV). Chevron currently uses natural-gas fired boilers to generate steam.

“It is a demonstration project,” Copelin says of the solar boiler. “We want to test this technology and determine its viability, and, based on the results of this, determine whether we might want to use it on a commercial scale. ... If we determine this is economically viable, than we might look at where else we might incorporate this in our operation.”

With low natural gas prices, however, solar steam faces a tough comparison.

Construction on the project will begin later this year. It is scheduled to come online by the end of 2010, Copelin says.

Chevron, the No. 2 US oil company behind Exxon Mobil, has not disclosed the expected steam output from the demonstration project. For comparison, a BrightSource demonstration project in Israel has more than 1,600 heliostats and generates 4-6 megawatts of electricity. The steam in the boiler reaches a temperature of 550 degrees Celsius.

CTV, which invests in companies and technologies that can improve the efficiency and environmental sustainability of Chevron’s operations, is an investor in BrightSource. Other oil company investors include Norway’s StatoilHydro Venture and BP Alternative Energy.

BrightSource has power purchase agreements with California utilities for 2.6 gigawatts of electricity, and that remains its first focus.

“The electricity generation is clearly our priority and our primary market,” company spokesman Keely Wachs tells Recharge, “but we also think that solar’s broad applications for industrial purposes can be a potentially lucrative market for us.”

BrightSource competitors including Ausra and eSolar are also eyeing industrial applications. Early this month, eSolar switched on a 5MW electricity generating concentrating solar project in Lancaster, California, that employs a similar technology to BrightSource. It is the first to come on line in the US.