Inexpensive 3-D Visualization of Geothermal Well Targeting

Abstract

Faults in geothermal systems play an important role in the permeability conditions around geothermal wells. Drilling is often aimed toward fault zones, because the permeability of large production geothermal wells mostly results from such faulting systems. The authors have developed a free, user-friendly Windows-based program to simulate a well trajectory penetrating a fault. A simple code was also written in order to display the output in three dimensions using the anaglyph red-cyan method. In this method, a fault is taken as a plane structure, and the well track is taken as the summation of line segments in 3-D space. The fault and the well track are represented by a mathematical equation, and the intersection point can be simulated. The output of the program is then plotted in separate 3-D panels, where each panel has a different azimuth and latitude of view in order to give the left and right images, respectively. The images are then filtered using red and cyan filters and overlaid into a single frame. Using 3-D red-cyan glasses, this final image yields a three-dimensional view that is often very helpful when making important drilling decisions.