Tue, 09 May, 2023
A new open source paper has been published offering details of research funded as part of the GEOPRO project.
The paper, ‘Cold Water Injection near the Magmatic Heat Source can Enhance Production from High-Enthalpy Geothermal Fields,’ has been published by the Geothermics journal and was co-authored by Alina Yapparova, Benoit Lamy-Chappuis, Samuel W. Scott, Gunnar Gunnarsson, and Thomas Driesner.
The research investigates solutions to the challenge of utilising hydrothermal fluids from existing deep geothermal wells that have been heated to supercritical temperatures for power generation.
The research looks into using deep geothermal wells that are drilled in the vicinity of intrusions for injection rather than production to enhance heat extraction from the intrusion, while simultaneously providing fluid pressure support to the overlying geothermal system.
Numerical models show that injection in the near-vicinity of a magmatic heat source increases the production potential of shallower geothermal wells, while local cooling of the hot rock near an intrusion allows an increased permeability and rate of heat transfer across the brittle-ductile transition. As the injected fluids ascend in upflow zones above the heat source they provide pressure support to shallower geothermal wells.
The models presented in the paper suggest that injection could increase the production potential of shallower geothermal wells by up to 10 percent after 30 years of well operation and by 20 percent after a theoretical 100 years of use, with the magnitude of the impact increasing with continued injection over longer timescales.
You can see the paper online by following this link.
The GEOPRO project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 851816