AMBITION
GEOPRO aims to generate advances in understanding and modelling of geofluid properties that has wide applicability across a majority of geothermal installations to ensure consistent behaviour across significantly different applications.
Our impacts
- Optimized energy extraction from existing systems (through tighter controls allowing strategically reduced safety margins) to remain within the production constraints of scaling, corrosion etc.
- Reduced OPEX costs through the ability to thermodynamically minimise scale formation at key points (flash points, heat exchangers, lower temperature reinjection) through control-oriented modeling
- The ability to better design well layouts, pipe dimensions, coatings using dynamic multi-phase geothermal flow assurance simulations coupled with a Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) tool
- Improved knowledge of reservoir fluid characteristics, allowing more accurate chemical thermometry and enthalpy calculations, and the ability to “vector in” onto productive reservoirs during exploration
- Improving the ability to expand the reinjection technology of waste water and green-house gases like CO2, H2S and CH4 that are currently being emitted to the atmosphere
Verifying the models on user sites
Demonstrating at sites representative of the different key geothermal development directions in Europe:
- A classical high-enthalpy geothermal system located in Turkey and situated in a volcano-clastic sedimentary pile, experiencing operational limitations due to high gas contents and scaling.
- A high-enthalpy geothermal system in Iceland, situated within oceanic crust and believed to be underlain by a supercritical resource that is scheduled for exploration and characterization and potential development.
- A medium-enthalpy geothermal opertaion in Germany that experiences classical operational limitations due to a significant CO2 and mineral load of the fluid as well as scaling and corrosion problems related to the complex fluid chemistry