Modeling Capabilities for Exploring Geothermal Options

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 19:00:00 -0500

Discovery: This work meets NSF’s aspirations of discovery through its multifaceted progress toward enabling transformation of the nation’s energy supply system to include widely the use of low-grade geothermal resources. Progress was made to understand the time needed for an Enhanced Geothermal System reservoir to recover after several years of heat production, which is knowledge that is fundamental to designing EGS systems. The team’s progress toward characterizing both the physical resource of heat in the rocks below much of Pennsylvania and New York and the most economically favorable combinations of communities and natural resources advances the interdisciplinary frontier of energy system knowledge. Learning: The student research team is diverse in several dimensions. Two of three IGERT trainees on the team are of Hispanic background, and two of them are women. They also come from different disciplines (Chemical Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Geological Sciences) to work together on an interdisciplinary problem. The three IGERT affiliated students who contributed strongly to the team further round out the diversity, as two of them are international students and one a U.S. majority male. An accomplishment of this group is that they have translated what might be considered to be abstract scientific and engineering research into a product that displays to the people of New York and Pennsylvania the potential for utilization of geothermal energy at a spatial scale that connects clearly to individual communities and in economic terms that are vital to those who make decisions about the future of those communities.