Numerical estimation of the geothermal potential from petroleum Mexican fields
Abstract
Currently in Mexico there is a great demand for energy, which makes it vitally important to make the most of renewable natural resources, both for their positive environmental impact and for providing long-term energy. One of these resources is geothermal, which Mexico has great potential under exploitation in well-known geothermal fields, and many other areas to be explored to determine its energy potential.
On the other hand, Mexico has very large continental petroleum zones, where thousands of boreholes were drilled to explore and exploit hydrocarbons. When the petroleum resources have been exhausted to an economically unviable point, the boreholes are abandoned or simply cease to be used. To propose an abandoned petroleum borehole for a geothermal project can reduce the project investment costs more than 50%, which makes this option considerably attractive when it comes to a very large network of boreholes without being used, including complete oil fields. Besides, in Mexico, it is known that the vast majority of petroleum boreholes were drilled in areas that contain higher than normal geothermal gradients (Reiter & Tovar, 1982; Blackwell et al., 2004; Espinoza-Ojeda et al., 2017), which makes them an untapped renewable source of geothermal energy. A created database of geological and thermal geophysical data from approximate 500 boreholes located in northern Mexico, it was used to analyze the subsurface temperature profiles and estimate the conductive surface heat flow. These parameters allow to estimate the heat (or thermal energy) storage in the subsurface. Hence, a 2D numerical thermal model was developed to determine the geothermal potential from Mexican petroleum zones. The TDMA method (Tri-Diagonal Matrix Algorithm) was applied as numerical solver of the heat transfer equations. As example from the obtained results, for the sedimentary basin of northern Chihuahua, 39 petroleum wellbores located in an area of 250 000 Km2, assuming conductive steady state conditions and for a 3 Km depth, the temperatures estimated are 175 to 190 °C. Keywords: Geothermal energy; Petroleum wellbores; Thermal profiles; heat flow; northern Mexico.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H33J2217R
- Keywords:
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- 1822 Geomechanics;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1869 Stochastic hydrology;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1873 Uncertainty assessment;
- HYDROLOGY