Tue, 21 September, 2021
Zorlu Energy’s R&D Manager, Ural Halaçoğlu gave an interview to Turkish magazine EKO IQ, where he spoke about Zorlu’s R&D work as well as providing some information about the GEOPRO project.
Ural explained how 100% of Zorlu Energy’s domestic electricity generation comes from renewable energy sources, helping to conserve the environment. He noted how the innovative mission of the company is to, “enhance renewable performance with international cooperation via framework programmes, and become a pioneer in the development of energy systems.”
Already taking part in seven different R&D and innovation projects, Ural said how Zorlu Energy are keen to increase the number of projects and help pioneer the future of renewable energy development.
“In addition,” Ural explained, “our innovation vision is to develop and adopt new technologies for better and efficient use of natural resources to provide a sustainable future.”
Zorlu Energy are strongly involved in geothermal energy initiatives, with their main R&D projects currently including GECO, GEOPRO, GEOSMART, SMART PDM, and eCHARGE4DRIVERS.
Speaking on GEOPRO in particular, Ural said, “GEOPRO aims to generate advances in understanding and modelling geofluid properties that have wide applicability across a majority of geothermal installations to ensure consistent behaviour across significantly different applications.”
He continued, “The GEOPRO project will produce a set of integrated knowledge-based design and operation tools to allow the geothermal industry to explore, design, and operate systems more effectively, reducing the LCOE to competitive levels.”
Ural explained that this will require the “generation of new, experimentally derived datasets to fill gaps in current knowledge of the heat and mass transfer behaviour of complex and highly concentrated fluids under hot and super-hot conditions,” adding, “These will provide next-generation equations of state, which we incorporate into a set of operation and exploration tools.”
He added that these new tools will provide benefits including, “the capability to better explore and ‘vector in’ on new resources; the ability to predict the return on a well more reliably for investment decisions; control-oriented simulations to reduce the engineering overkill currently required; and improved energy extraction through knowledge of the real production constraints.”
The interview, which was published in Turkish, can be read in full by following this link and heading to pages 43-46.