Ensuring Resource Adequacy for a Commercial Geothermal Project

Abstract

This paper reviews the available approaches to ensuring resource adequacy for a commercial geothermal project, particularly from the viewpoint of investors who are familiar with investment in the petroleum and mining industries. Adequacy of the resource quality and well productivity or injectivity can be readily ensured through drilling and testing of wells. However, establishing the adequacy of recoverable energy reserves for a project can be challenging because of the inherent weakness in the concept of “reserves” in the geothermal context as opposed to oil, gas or mining projects. The concept of reserves and the approaches to reserve estimation in the petroleum and geothermal industries are compared and contrasted. Another aspect of resource adequacy assessment for a commercial geothermal project, namely, forecasting of reservoir performance is reviewed. The review shows that the perceived resource adequacy risk can be covered for a commercial project in several possible ways.