Closing date: 8 August 2019
Salary: £32,236–£36,261
Location: The Lyell Centre, School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society, Edinburgh, Scotland
Duration: 18 months fixed-term
You will join the GWatt project, which is a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded project (“GWatt – Geothermal PoWer GenerATed from UK GraniTes”) with 7 partners from academia and industry and coordinated by the British Geological Survey. This position is based at the Lyell Centre with strong links to the Institute of Petroleum Engineering at Heriot-Watt University.
GWatt is funded through NERC (Highlight Topics 2018). GWatt aims to tackle challenges related to deep geothermal systems, focusing on knowledge gaps about permeability and fluid/heat flow within fractured hot rocks. Novel studies of rock stress, natural fracture networks, hot rock permeability, heat/fluid transport, and optimisation are performed to fill these gaps. This project helps to enable the prediction of the economically-utilisable geothermal resource, the optimisation of reservoir development and the quantification of geological uncertainty and geological risks (such as induced seismicity). GWatt utilises data obtained from two new boreholes in granite being developed at the UK’s deepest onshore geothermal project at United Downs in Cornwall.
The specific task at HWU are funded for 18 months and will focus on the evaluation of the frictional and transport properties of granite fault rocks in a deep geothermal setting, over the lifetime of the well. This will be done via laboratory experiments using natural granite fault materials. The experiments are aimed at providing insight into the risk of induced seismicity and the efficiency of fluid/heat flow in the well.
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