Sustainability of Geothermal Energy Utilization

Abstract

Growing worldwide population and expanding economic development are causing increased stress on the natural environment. There is a rising international awareness that we must make future development sustainable or risk catastrophic deterioration of the environment. The sustainability of production from geothermal resources is a topic that has received almost no study, leaving the question open to conjecture. As geologic phenomena, hydrothermal systems in the continental crust can be shown to persist for tens of thousands of years. However, system lifetimes can be foreshortened by artificial production at the surface during geothermal energy extraction. Geothermal project feasibility studies typically deal only with developing a certain sized power plant to be run for an arbitrary period, usually 30 years. Such limited studies fail to capture a true measure of the useful energy that can be produced from a geothermal resource.

The International Energy Agency (lEA) is considering coordinating work to provide public information on the sustainability of production from geothermal reservoirs. The objective of this work would be to study important facets of the production of energy from geothermal resources with the view of determining the long-term economic sustainability of such production.