Considering the high cost associated with the exploration of HDR resources including well stimulation and fracturing, I think an effective technique to reduce the cost of such technology can be utilising it in a nearby fossil-fuel power plant.
This not only reduces the necessity of building a geothermal surface binary power plant and transmission line, but will also greatly increase the thermal efficiency of utilising HDR resources.
For detailed investigation on this option, you are welcome to visit my site and check out the relevant papers.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Cheng (Wallace) Zhou
Yes, I agree with you on the point that integrated utilization of geothermal with other sources of energy does improve its efficiency. However, the question of effective techniques for exploration still remains unanswered.
Dear Zhonghe Pang,
As far as exploration techniques are concerned, there is a very good review in the
book "Geothermal Energy Systems" (E. Huenges, ed., Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co, 2010), by Bruhn et al. (the second chapter). However, as usual, "exploration at the office" is still not considered as a valuable mean to predict where HDR/EGS could be located. "This is not expensive enough, neither efficient" !!!
Well, in the following paper, you can see that numerical models of hydrothermal convection in well-constrained geological systems allow prediction of neighbouring thermal anomalies ! These models were first aimed at reproducing measured temperature profiles, but it turned out that 6 km westwards, hotter temperatures at shallower depths were predicted... and a recent geothermal project confirmed what was predicted... at the office...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2013.02.008
Cheers,
Laurent
sorry for the link which soes not seem to work well,
use jvolgeores.2013.02.008 or my personal RGpage
You may use magnetotelluric survey for solving this problem. You may also write to Hayrullah Dagistan ([email protected]) for detailed information.
I think that as for conventional geothermal resources the 3D seismic is the most effective methodology to characterize the subsurface, especially in terms of the reconstruction of the geometry at depth.
Except for the radiogenic heat production, deep magmatic heat sources are usually the only source to be located. MT techniques are very useful in locating a magma chamber.
