Technology:

Taking the Temperature of Deep Geothermal Reservoirs (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Scientists collect water samples from a hot spring near Dixie Valley, Nevada.
(courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

A lot can happen to water as it rises to the surface from deep underground. It can mix with groundwater, for example. This makes it difficult for scientists to estimate the temperature of a geothermal reservoir, which is an important step as they decide whether a site merits further exploration as a source of clean, renewable energy.

Now, Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a new way to take a geothermal reservoir’s temperature.

The method isn't new really, but rather a high-tech makeover of a 20-year-old technique. It’s a computer program, called GeoT, which calculates a deep reservoir’s temperature by starting with the concentrations of dissolved salts in a fluid sample obtained at the surface, such as from a hot spring. It then reconstructs the data to reflect what the water composition would be in a deep geothermal reservoir, which can be one kilometer underground.

“Our method is not intended to replace older techniques, but to complement them and advance a way of investigating deep reservoirs in a more integrated manner,” says Nicolas Spycher, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division and GRC Member, who leads the project.

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