The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) contracted the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to help develop a streamlined methodology for determining if a newly drilled geothermal well is "producible," which means a well is producing or capable of producing geothermal resources in commercial quantities. This designation is essential for the BLM to grant a production extension to the respective lease or unit. This is a straightforward problem to solve in oil and gas: Demonstrate that a well is economically viable, meaning it is capable of producing sufficient oil or gas to exceed direct operating costs and lease-related expenses, such as rentals or minimum royalties. In oil and gas, it is possible to produce from a single oil or gas well and these costs are known or possible to estimate. In geothermal, the problem is more complex: more than one successful well is necessary to define the potential output of a geothermal resource (in MWe) to design appropriate power plant(s). As such, power plant(s) are not designed until well after additional wells are drilled and tested. Therefore, in the case of geothermal, the operating costs are not known after drilling just the first successful well, as can be the case in oil and gas. Although this designation is critical for advancing geothermal power plant development on BLM-managed lands, current geothermal well assessments often rely on ad hoc approaches that can be complex, operator-biased, and heavy in assumptions related to economic viability. To address this, we have developed two complementary methodologies: a minimum power requirement-based approach and a productivity index (PI)-based approach. These methods leverage key flow test data—pressure, temperature, flow rate, and specific enthalpy—to provide reliable and standardized producible well determinations. The minimum power requirement-based approach evaluates wells against specific power output thresholds informed by reservoir experts and the associated temperature requirements. The PI-based approach assesses well productivity using widely accepted reservoir engineering metrics, proposing a threshold of 2.5 kg/s/bar. Both methods are data-driven and grounded in empirical production data from operational geothermal wells, avoiding uncertain economic assumptions while maintaining decision-making accuracy. Wells falling below key performance thresholds (i.e., PI, specific power) are deemed non-producible. These methodologies aim to streamline BLM’s decision-making process, reduce nontechnical barriers to geothermal energy adoption, and enable regulatory expansion into states lacking geothermal expertise. Preliminary results indicate clear trends and thresholds in production data that provide actionable insights for evaluating well producibility. Validation using well completion report (WCR) data is ongoing, with promising results demonstrating the potential for these standardized methodologies to impact geothermal development significantly.

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