GEOTREF aims to improve the understanding of fractured geothermal reservoirs. This is, on one hand, to reduce what is known as the geothermal “geological risk” in order to optimize exploration costs and, on the other hand, to ensure sustainable exploitation of the reservoir during the production phase. To this end, a technological bridge will be established between the oil industry and geothermal energy for geothermal energy to benefit from the scientific and technological achievements of oil exploration. Concretely, GEOTREF aims to produce a modeling of the reservoir to simulate the impact of different drilling positions and fluid flow rates collected.
The two main components
The project is divided into two large groups that interact:
GEOTREF aims to overcome a set of technical challenges:
- Develop innovative methods and tools to investigate, model and integrate all available data from the fractured fields into a single software platform.
- Develop skills and synergies of all methodological aspects of reservoir modeling, based on methods and tools commonly found in the oil sector, improving or supplementing them in the application to geothermal energy.
- Apply these methods and tools in fields conducive to the development of geothermal energy and still untapped in the Caribbean: the first will be located in Guadeloupe.
The operations, which started in early 2015, will be distributed over four years, with a total budget of €43 million.
Project planning