A Holistic Approach to Improve the Potential of Low Enthalpy Geothermal Resources Using Unified System Modeling

Low enthalpy resources can only be used for limited applications such as greenhouse warming in winter, food products drying and fish-farming, due to their limited potential. However, experience has shown that manual control of such resources leads to highly suboptimal utilization of the geothermal resource potential. This is to a great extent due to the lack of a unified modelling approach which would combine the reservoir, the wellbores and the surface network that eventually drives hot water to the delivery point, in a single, holistic model. In this work a workflow is developed aiming at the combined modelling of flow in all three subsystems, thus allowing for the global optimization of the exploitation scheme and maximization of geothermal energy production under proper sustainability constraints. The application results demonstrate the superiority of the achieved resource utilization compared to naïve, experience-based approaches.