Objectives

DESCRAMBLE’s Vision is to contribute to reach the EU strategic energy and climate targets for 2020 and 2050 by fostering increased growth in the geothermal electricity market, through increased awareness of the potential of geothermal electricity production and the demonstration of the feasibility of extracting electricity from super-critical deep geothermal reservoirs.

Specific Objectives:

• Demonstrate safe drilling of a deep super-critical geothermal well, by identifying hitherto existing technical problems created by super-critical conditions, overcoming these problems through novel improved drilling procedures, equipment and well design, and extending the Venelle 2 well into a very high temperature formation.
• Reduce the technical and financial risks of drilling and exploiting deep geothermal wells by improving knowledge of the physical and chemical conditions in deep geothermal formations. Characterisation of the physical and chemical properties of deep crustal fluids and rocks will be performed. In addition to standard logging during drilling, a novel measurement tool will be developed and used to measure pressure and temperature in supercritical conditions. The knowledge gained will be disseminated in industry related channels.
• Reduce pre-drill uncertainty in the exploration of deep geothermal wells by applying the latest seismic processing, imaging and interpretation technology for exploring the supercritical reservoir prior to drilling. The seismic methods will be evaluated and calibrated based on results obtained during drilling.
• Investigate the economic potential of exploiting chemicals and minerals by analysing fluid samples for valuable materials.