Citation:
Theo Renaud, Michal Stebel, Patrick Verdin and Gioia Falcone. CFD modeling of a high enthalpy geothermal context. Proceedings of the 43rd Workshop on Geothermal Reservoir Engineering, 12-14 Feb 2018, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. SGP-TR-213
Abstract:
The promising development of highly energetic geothermal resources could considerably enhance geothermal power production
worldwide. The first attempt at tapping supercritical/heated fluids was made by the Iceland Deep Drilling project (IDDP), but
unfortunately a magma layer at a depth of 2,100m was encountered, and the drilling was abandoned. Yet, this drilling operation failure
generated new opportunities for assessing the potential power generation close to shallow magmatic intrusions. Detailed numerical
methods are required to assess the heat transfer and fluid thermodynamics at wellbore and reservoir scale at near supercritical conditions
to provide production scenarios and forecasts as accurate as possible. A primary steady-state study of reservoir and wellbore heat
extraction from a geothermal well near a magmatic chamber has been performed with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques.
Using simplified geological assumptions based on the IDDP-1 well description, a 2D axisymmetric single phase flow model was
developed and its results were compared to those obtained with a full 3D CFD model. The simulated output power simulations reached
25 MW at 350°C and a wellhead pressure of 140 bars. Methodology and results from this study show that CFD techniques can be
successfully used to assess geothermal energy outputs for unconventional geothermal wells and can provide details of a vapor superheated
flow structure at wellbore-reservoir scale.
