Breaking Down Development Cost Barriers for Geothermal Reservoir Monitoring Systems ‘Anyone’ Can Program

Abstract

This paper presents a means for breaking down the cost barriers in geothermal well monitoring and logging tool development. One of the major costs of any reservoir monitoring system is in the design and testing of the electronics and supporting system software. In fact, it is normal to spend over $100K USD on software development alone. Given the small size of the geothermal market, this cost greatly impedes technology development. This paper is exploring a new concept where geothermal reservoir testing electronics are built around existing small and low cost public domain systems where millions of users are sharing in community technology development! Two such systems are discussed: Arduino and BeagleBone Black. These systems are being used in high school and college level classes around the world to train future engineers and scientists. These systems sell from $10 to $50 each. A resent search on Ebay.com for “Arduino Sensor Kit” returned 1095 entries with many kits offering over 30 individual sensors for less than $1 each: many with free software. Sensors for temperature, pressure, humidity, acoustic distance measurement, electrical conductivity and many more. Arduino and BeagleBone Black systems are standalone microprocessor based systems with 8bit and 32bit processing respectfully. This paper outlines how to take advantage of these low cost systems to do scientific data collection benefitting the geothermal industry. An example is given on how easy it is to program the Arduino to capture well data from the Perma Works high temperature geothermal reservoir testing tool. The Perma Works’ tool is capable of continuous well monitoring up to 275°C. A second example is given using the BeagleBone Black to capture VHD images from a geothermal well inspection camera being developed at Perma Works.