Digging
geothermal
Gemma Church investigates how simulation and modelling de-risks the detection
and extraction of geothermal energy resources T
he geothermal sector is a hot topic of active research within the growing renewable energy industry. Yet the detection and extraction of geothermal
resources contains many complexities and, while simulation and modelling helps to address some of these challenges, there are still issues to overcome. In recent times, these challenges have been
largely addressed by multiphysics simulations, which match the multiphysics nature of geothermal resource detection and extraction from shallow to deep subsurface levels. For example, simulation and modelling has
helped to reduce the high exploration and high investment costs for the sector, and mitigate the risk of failure during the extraction and drilling/ stimulation phase of a geothermal project.
12 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
Simulation and modelling has achieved this through improvements in resource assessment and forecasting, optimising extraction technologies and techniques, as well as mitigating the environmental impact. Seismic interpretation is oſten the first
simulation that takes place in geothermal oil or gas exploration, as Rick Watkins, regional manager at Altair, explained: ‘Fundamentally, it is reverse-engineering the behaviour of waves traveling through the subsurface rock. Te waves are generated by thumpers on the ground/water surface and their reflections are captured by sensors.’ Tere are a few commercial codes for this
(SeisSpace PROMAX and Landmark are two of the dominant players) but there are many individual seismic processing companies, in
addition to operators, that have their own proprietary interpretation codes. Watkins said: ‘For these applications, the modelling tools are used to interpret what the simulation produces, rather than the other way around. Tere can be a lot of variability in the models generated at this step in the process. Te companies and groups running these applications tend to be highly invested in High Performance Computing (HPC) because of the scalability of this operation.’ ‘As such, integration with a HPC workload
management system, such as Altair’s PBS Works suite, can be very important to the overall performance of the simulation. As hybrid- and cloud-computing become more prevalent, the benefits of integrations that enable remote visualisation, job submission and cloud management are greatly amplified because the
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