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project info
Start date: 11 March 2016
End date: 30 June 2019
funding
Fund: European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
Total budget: 4 775 933,80 €
EU contribution: 2 767 176,04 € (57,94%)
programme
Programming period: 2014-2021
Managing authority: Nemzetgazdasági Minisztérium Gazdaságfejlesztési Programokért Felelős Helyettes Államtitkárság

Development of surface-increased well-training and operation technology in a deep geothermal extraction and injection system installed on a porous reservoir

A) Presentation of the professional content of the aid application is slowly becoming a public place that Hungary and, more broadly, Central-East Europe can take the biggest step in the transition from fossil fuels to green energy in direct municipal or agricultural heat supply based on geothermal energy. Although the geothermal potential of Hungary and the region is good in the world, the expansion of the geothermal industry, which is projected for the last 10 years, has not been able to keep pace with international trends — true, the ratio of geothermal energy in the national and regional energy mix has slightly improved in recent years, and 2-3 new deep thermal systems have been built in Hungary every year. In addition to a number of economic and geopolitical reasons, the backlog is due to the fact that the use of thermal energy is technically and scientifically low in technology, and therefore the extraction of geothermal energy is relatively high technical risk and specificly expensive, whereas if the thermal fluoride extracted is injected back into the reservoir, it could be the most environmentally friendly, 100 % renewable heating energy use based on local reserves. At the same time, in the case of thermal systems that are planted on plumbed continental and river-delta sedimentary water streams, the technological difficulties of the said injection cause most of the problems, the emergence of which is induced by the economic consequences of the widespread view in Hungary that thermal water produced from porous sand belts is absolutely impossible to inject back. Despite the fact that successful extraction and injection systems have been in operation in Hungary for almost 25 years in this geological environment, it is a fact that in these poorly consolidated sandstone reservoirs it is not possible to develop well systems with normal water production and well drilling technologies, and the very high-pressure regenerative regeneration process used in the petroleum industry is extremely expensive, and it also destroys the reservoir’s rock frame. Already 90 % of the Hungarian thermal water springs (and Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia) that can be caught up in energy war can be extracted from these high Pannonian water streams, typically located at a depth of 1,200-2.200 m. According to the current practice, there is no other solution but to deepen 2 pumps of re-injection wells that provide an average of 60-80 m³/h of thermal water with a temperature of 60 to 110 °C, since a well is not able to readmit the total amount of water extracted. This makes projects significantly more expensive, worsening their returns, and the space requirement for the 2 re-injection wells is one of the bottlenecks in the design of the system. (On the other established practice — whereby thermal water with high mineral content, polluting, often loaded with carcinogens, is released into surface lakes and rivers, we do not mention this, because the experts of our development consortium believe that polluting thermal water must be fully restored both in order to avoid surface pollution and also due to the sustainable and long-term extraction of reservoirs with slow replenishment.) where thermal water extracted from the extraction wells of sandstone reservoirs can be fed back to the reservoir at the lowest cost, through one injection well. To do this, it is necessary to: — the perforated sections formed in the depths of the re-received, sandstone fraction layers should be as long as possible, so the longest possible to drive the well into the geophysically verified layer, — the lower the rate of exit of the repressed fluid from the repressive well perforation, i.e. the thermal fluid, enter the rock on an increased surface, — the placement and extraction dynamics of the extraction well systems facilitate long-term sustainable production and not only take into account the hydrodynamic, water and heat transport characteristics of the production area, especially where many well production takes place, in a way that is minimal (and indeed inadequate) for water and environmental permits, whether due to the metropolitan environment or CH-mining, the extraction of organic and inorganic chemical substances in wells, pipelines, filters, mechanical equipment on the surface and deep and even in the receiving stone can be prevented by accurate knowledge of physico-chemical, hydrogeological and hydrogeochemical changes in the extracted thermal fluoride during energy use. Piloting all these problems in the system and developing and optimising the re-injection technology that is built on it makes the extraction and use of geothermal energy cheaper, reducing the technical and geological risk of operation and thus making geothermal energy use more attractive for investors and for-profit or municipal sectors. On the other hand, beyond the obvious economic benefits

Flag of Hungary  Csongrád, Hungary