One day in my geothermal life, my boss Peter tells me: “in geothermal, we (i.e., geothermal people) do everything right; a bunch of subsurface studies that justify our project and are widely appraised by the scientific community. At some point, we need to drill. Because the drilling expertise dwells in the oil and gas industry, we call onto oil and gas people and then… everything starts falling apart into a big mess, and the project eventually fails.” And in conclusion: “oil and gas people are good at what they are doing in their industry, but are unable to successfully complete a geothermal project.”
Because I was coming from oil and gas, I was somewhat feeling targeted by Peter’s statement.
“Peter”, I replied, “projects fail all the time in oil and gas too, but then, we slip them under the carpet and drill the next well. The successful projects largely pay for the numerous failures. In geothermal, after a failure, the budget is gone and the company goes bust, and the successful projects will never pay for the failures”.
Indeed, the technical frontiers are permeable between oil and gas, and geothermal. However, the economics are totally different. If oil and gas is a high-risk / high-reward business, geothermal is high-risk / low-reward. Therefore, the support of public funds is an absolute necessity, and even more so in places where subsurface data are lacking. Anyone who thinks about transitioning from oil and gas to geothermal must understand this hard reality. Because of its high-risk and low-reward nature, the geothermal industry needs the support of the best engineers and scientists who, hopefully, would be able to lower the risk (the reward is unlikely to improve). But unfortunately, the geothermal industry cannot compete with oil and gas for compensations and benefits.
For some reason, oil and gas people think that they can bring a lot to the geothermal industry, notably when the oil and gas industry experiences a downturn and proceeds with massive layoffs. The reasons for this thinking are not entirely clear to me. The geothermal industry is globally older than the oil and gas, and geothermal people did not wait for SPE, EAGE, AAPG or other professional organisations to build their own, such as IGA, WGC, Geothermica, ETIP, EGEC, etc. They organize strings of congresses, forums and workshops and publish a large quantity of technical papers that are not always accessible from One Petro, even when they can be downloaded for free.
The oil and gas people have the reputation to look at their geothermal counterparts with a condescending attitude, and frankly that is often true and somehow irritating, largely in part because of the difference in income, and also because only in difficult times do the oil and gas glories think of reaching (down?) to the geothermal field. Just looking at the titles of some events organized by petroleum folks to “help advance” geothermal is annoying. I am impatient to attend a workshop in which geothermal engineers would help the oil and gas folks to be more efficient (I will come back to that later).
The geothermal community is not lacking subsurface scientists and engineers. The tools used by the petroleum workers to image the subsurface are the same in both industries. Sometimes, existing tools maybe disregarded in geothermal because of their cost rather than a lack of knowledge. But geothermal folks are looking for some form of hydro-geologic system that geophysics is unable to provide directly. The hydrocarbon traps that oil and gas people search in basins with a known depositional history, is very different from a “geothermal system”. Finding a permeable system connected to a recharge mechanism that you are going top tap when the water is warm enough for the specific usage, is not straightforward, and oil and gas people are not better equipped than other geoscientists to make such discoveries. In dry rock projects, drilled in the basement, seismic response is often unable to provide answers on the fractured nature of the rock, let alone its temperature.
Reservoir engineers in geothermal, use also the same tools, however these tools are sometimes limited in modelling the rock behaviour and fluid rheology at the depth, temperature and in the rock types that are the target of certain geothermal projects. In some cases, the injectivity of the injector well of a doublet is the bottleneck of the entire system. Unfortunately, the oil and gas community is not especially good at drilling high-rate injector wells, in particular when clastic rock is the target.
Many geothermal wells share specific requirements: high rate (e.g., 50 l/s = 27’000 bwpd), high temperature (e.g.,180°C =350°F), often corrosive fluids, and… be low cost. How many oil and gas people have experienced such conditions, know about alternative drilling technologies such as hammer drilling (fairly common in geothermal)? Not that many.
We tend to think that the technologies are there and ready to use by experienced oilfield hands. When looking in details, the technologies that exist have been developed for oil and gas. To implement them to geothermal, they need to be adapted: larger diameters, higher temperatures, different fluids, etc. When these adaptation and qualification are discussed with technology providers, they tend to bow out, in part because the market is small, and the funding is lacking. Service providers find geothermal great when they can provide their products off-the-shelf and sell them as-is for geothermal applications… but forget about development.
In a sense, we, people, are a bit the same. If we think that:
- we can apply our oil and gas skills directly to geothermal projects without some form of education and training,
- and we earn high salaries and hefty benefits because of our immense talent that is unparalleled within our geothermal counterparts,
then, we are badly misled.