The similarities and differences in reservoir
engineering in the geothermal and petroleum
industries are not familiar to many. This
unfamiliarity frequently leads to aberrant perception
of the risks and rewards of geothermal development
in the minds of developers and financiers who are
accustomed to the petroleum industry but are new to
geothermal. This paper is a comparative survey of
the state-of-the-art of reservoir engineering in the two
industries.

This survey leads to the following conclusions. First,
compared to petroleum, geothermal reservoir
engineering is more challenging in that conceptual
modeling has more complexity, parameter estimation
has more limitations, and volumetric reserve
estimation has more uncertainty. However, the
saving grace of geothermal reservoir engineering is
numerical simulation, which allows one to overcome
the above limitations and produce estimates of
reserves and forecasts of reservoir and well behavior
that are at least as reliable as in the petroleum
industry. Second, the term ìreservesî in the
geothermal industry has no standard definition, and
in fact is a misnomer compared to the usage in the
petroleum industry. Third, unlike in the petroleum
industry, reservoir engineering and geoscience are
intricately intertwined in geothermal. Finally,
empirical knowledge about the nature of geothermal
reservoirs is minimal and the body of literature on
geothermal case histories is minuscule compared to
petroleum. This imposes a higher premium on the
practical experience of the engineer in geothermal
reservoir engineering.

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