Abstract
Current geothermal power generation from engineered geothermal system (EGS) technologies has two bottle-necks in practical use: one is that the recoverability of injected water is about 50% or less than that in fracture-dominant regions such as Japan, which inevitably requires replenishing large volumes of injected water throughout the power generation operation, and the other is that the injected water raises pore fluid pressures in crustal rocks, causing induced-earthquakes. This paper proposes a new power generation method, which has the potential to resolve these two bottle-necks using EGS technologies in ductile zones. With this method, an artificial brittle fracture reservoir system is completely surrounded by ductile zones at a temperature exceeding 500°C, the presence of which has already been confirmed at the Kakkonda geothermal field, northeastern Japan. The profitability of this method is highly dependent on the depth of drilling, but this concept could dramatically expand exploitable thermal conduction geothermal resources beyond the brittle zones.
