Francesco Parisio1,2,3 & Keita Yoshioka4,5
1IDAEA-CSIC, Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research, Spanish National Research Council, Barcelona, Spain; 2IMEDEA-CSIC, Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies, Spanish National Research Council, Esporles, Spain; 3Associated Unit: Hydrogeology Group UPC-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain; 4Department of Environmental Informatics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany; 5Department of Civil Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Emails: [email protected]
Emails: [email protected]
The harvesting of geothermal energy for electricity production has more than a century of history. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the quest to expand available resources, driving the efforts of the geothermal community from High-Enthalpy (HE) towards Supercritical Geothermal Systems (SGS). SGS aim at harvesting energy by directly tapping into the high energetic content of supercritical fluids, with the potential to boost the productivity up to one order of magnitude with estimates of 50 MW per well. For both systems, the conditions of high temperature (>300 °C) and high pressure (>15 MPa) are extremely difficult to reproduce in controlled laboratory experiments. At the same time, access to in-situ information from depth is also a great challenge, perhaps even greater: off-the-shell drill-bits and sensors may not withstand the high temperature and highly corrosive environments. With scarcely available data, characterization of the system must rely on first principles, on a few experimental data points and on inversion studies based on in-situ direct and indirect observations. Compared to conventional geothermal systems, HE and SGS are difficult to study and difficult to observe, which makes them prone to risk and uncertainty. A common trait is the multi-physics nature of HE and SGS, which involve fluids at high temperature and/or pressure in volcanic or magmatic areas. Phase-transitions, multi-component flow, enhanced chemical reactivity and complex mechanical behaviours of rock are all characteristics that intrinsically depend on the high-energy of the system. The goal of this session is to bring together experts in high-temperature reservoirs to present the latest advancements in the understanding of multi-physics couplings in HE and SGS. The session welcomes proposals that investigate the problem from different perspectives, ranging from laboratory experiments, to meso-scale and in-situ studies, data collection, geophysical studies, physics-based forward simulations, machine learning, statistical learning and artificial intelligence studies. In a nutshell, the session welcomes every contribution that provides improved understandings and new challenges in the multi-physics of HE and SGS.