The Research and Development for the Geothermal Energy in JOGMEC，JAPAN

Abstract

Until the year of 2003, the technology development for the geothermal energy had been conducted by NEDO under the METI’s Sunshine and New-Sunshine promotions. The development supported by the government was, however, suspended by the political decision. After the electricity failure caused by the Tsunami in 2011, the geothermal energy came under the spotlight and the technology development was restarted by NEDO and JOGMEC. The underground technologies around the reservoir are conducted by JOGMEC such as potential evaluation, exploration, drilling and so on. Three projects concerned with the geothermal technology development are being carried out in JOGMEC. One is the exploration project of the precious detection of the fractures by the reflection seismic technique. The seismic method is considered to be hard to conduct in the geothermal field because of the complex geological setting but it has highly developed in the oil and natural gas field exploration. We have reviewed this technique and applied to the seismic reflection data which were already collected. Another project is the survey project using the exploration equipment installed in the helicopter. The airborne survey with the gravity gradiometer was conducted in 2013 over the geothermal areas in Kyushu, southwest Japan. The resisitivity exploration using the transient electromagnetic method survey with the current loop and magnetometer was also planned at the same areas in the gradiometer survey. The last one is the technology for maintaining the reservoir pressure by recharging water into the reservoir. We will present the R&D programs in JOGMEC and show the current results.