Heat Deliverability of Homogeneous Geothermal Reservoirs

Abstract

For the last two decades, the petroleum industry has been successfully using simple inflow performance relationships (IPR's) to predict oil deliverability. In contrast, the geothermal industry lacked a simple and reliable method to estimate geothermal wells' heat deliverability. To addres this gap in the standard geothermal-reservoirassessment arsenal, we developed generalized dimensionless geothermal inflow performance relationships (GIPR's) . These "reference curvesg1 may be regarded as an approximate general solution of the equations describingthe practically important case of radial 2- phase inflow. Based on this approximate solution, we outline a straightforward approach to estimate the reservoir contribution to geothermal wells' heat and mass deliverability for 2-phase reservoirs. This approach is far less costly and in most cases as reliable as numerically modelling the reservoir, which is the alternative for 2-phase inflow.