The “inventories” of the world’s resources have mainly been carried out in the United States and Europe. However, these inventories often depend on the only known subsoil temperature data from mining, oil and geothermal drilling, or on surface manifestations such as volcanism and thermal resurgence.

 

Thus, these inventories show potential resources whose strategic stakes are very high: 356 GWe for the United States (USGS 2008, electrical potential of hydrothermal resources and EGS), 100 GWe for Europe (The European HDR project at Soultz presentation, 2004).

 

In Europe, the main exploited or potential deep geothermal resources are located in Turkey, Central Europe, France, and Italy (Larderello). On the map, these are the red, pink and brown areas.

Map of Europe and France of temperatures at 5 km depth:

TLS_Isothermes5kmEUROPE_Web2.png

OUR APPROACH

Nevertheless, we believe that the inventories should take into consideration a key parameter of the exploitation of a geothermal resource: the permeability. This parameter impacts the potential flow rates of the reservoir rocks and therefore the power of the deposits.

At TLS Geothermics, we believe that it is necessary to choose the type of deposit that we are looking for before launching the exploration campaign, as in oil research.

For several years, we have been developing a geothermal deposit concept that integrates 4 key parameters to identify economic resources: temperature and permeability that characterize the quantity of extractable heat, durability and depth for the economic approach.

Taking into account this concept of deposit as well as the surface geothermal heat flow, we have made a quick sketch of the probable potential of this concept at the European scale.

 

Thus, if the faults mapped at 1/1.5M are for 5% of them sufficiently permeable to allow an installation of 10MWe every 20 km, then the European potential would be 6.8GWe.

CC_WTFM2020w.png

Internationally, TLS Geothermics is working on evaluating the global potential of the Crustal Fault Zone concept using the latest state-of-the-art predictive computing technologies.