An exciting drilling campaign in exciting geology
Did EBN set a trend? That’s to be seen, but the four-well geothermal drilling campaign the Croatian Hydrocarbon Agency recently embarked on to prove the potential of an equal number…
Geothermal
Coring a geothermal reservoir in oil and gas heartlands
Lower Saxony, the German state that finds itself in the north-western part of the country, has a rich history in drilling and coring. But until recently, activities on that front…
Bacterial life is everywhere in the subsurface
Elsemiek Croese. Photography: Elsemiek Croese private archive. “Let’s put it this way,” says Elsemiek Croese from Microbial Analysis, “one of the key ingredients of life is water. In that light,…
Not-so-hot volcanic rocks in Saudi Arabia
This in what a team of researchers concluded in a paper published in the journal Geothermics this year. It must have been a bit of a surprise to find very…
How interested is Eavor in sharing drilling results of the Geretsried project?
If I fail to hear back from companies when enquiring for information about a project, I mostly decide not to write about it at all. But in the case of…
Preventing scaling in geothermal production wells
The Munich area in Germany is lucky when it comes to its geothermal potential. There is a good Upper Jurassic carbonate reservoir at the right depth, and the water composition…
Too fast, too soon
In Geothermal energy production, it is all about the temperature of the produced water, brine or steam. A drop in temperature has a direct effect on the amount of energy…
Pushing the limits of tracer technology
Utah FORGE project. Photography: Resman Energy Technology. “The conventional oil and gas industry has been familiar with tracer technology for a long time,” says Roy Greig from RESMAN Energy Technology.…
The presence of oil and gas at a geothermal conference
“I work on gas installations, but I have come to this conference to network, as so many people from the sector are here,” somebody tells me at the lunch table…
Every site is different
James Horton at a closed loop manifold installation at Birmingham’s Moseley Hall Hospital. Source: James Horton. Shallow closed loop boreholes (150-300 m deep) for ground source heat pumps (GSHP) are…
Faster and faster
Drilling faster is a big driver for technological development in every aspect of the subsurface industry, and the shallow geothermal sector is no exception. “We can significantly increase the drilling…
Drilling into new frontiers – drilling into magma
No, it is not entirely new. Drilling straight into magma has happened before. But in Iceland, the Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) consortium is now going to research it more rigorously…