Two of the primary challenges for societies are to increase the installed capacity, integration, and utilization of renewable energy technologies while simultaneously reducing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that is emitted to the atmosphere from present energy and industrial systems. We investigated the efficacy of generating electricity using renewable geothermal heat that is extracted by CO2 that is sequestered in sedimentary basins. Geothermal energy technologies have typically focused on natural faulted and fragmented systems, and enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) have been proposed to harness the heat from hot dry rock. Here, we characterized the potential geothermal resource base for generating electricity using naturally porous and permeable sedimentary basins where CO2 can be sequestered and circulated to extract heat. To determine the efficacy of sedimentary basin CO2-Geothermal power production in the United States, we conducted a geospatial resource assessment of subsurface CO2 storage capacity and heat flow. We developed an integrated systems model that combines power plant performance modeling, reservoir modeling, and the economic costs of a CO2-geothermal power plant and a CO2 storage operation. Our resource assessment combines the estimates of the physical (e.g., net power) and economic (e.g., levelized cost of electricity, capital cost) performance of an individual CO2-Geothermal power plant for a range of reservoir characteristics (permeability, depth, geothermal temperature gradient). The integrated systems model is based on inverted five-spot injection patterns that are common in CO2-enhanced oil recovery operations. In these patterns, CO2 is injected into a well located in the center of square with CO2-production wells on the corners. Our integrated systems model allows for these patterns to be coupled together, so that the CO2 that is extracted by a production well can be composed of portions of the CO2 that was injected in the four neighboring injection wells. We determined the diameter of the individual wells and the size coupled inverted five-spot well patterns that most effectively used the physical and economic economies of scale for the coupled reservoir and power plant. We found that CO2-Geothermal power plants can be cost-effectively deployed in a large region of the United States, and that these cost-effective CO2-Geothermal electricity facilities can also be capacity-competitive with many existing baseload and renewable energy technologies over a range of reservoir parameters. This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation Sustainable Energy Pathways program, grant 1230691.

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