Retrofitting abandoned petroleum wells as doublet deep borehole heat exchangers for geothermal energy production—a numerical investigation

Xincheng Hu, Jonathan Banks, Yunting Guo and Wei Victor Liu

Renewable Energy, 2021, vol. 176, issue C, 115-134

Abstract: This study aims to develop a simulation model to investigate the feasibility of extracting geothermal energy from abandoned petroleum wells using doublet deep borehole heat exchangers (DBHEs) in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin near Hinton. A three-dimensional simulation model that simplifies heat convection to one dimension was built and verified with a conjugate heat transfer model. The simulation results show that doublet DBHEs perform better than single-well DBHEs in extracting geothermal energy from abandoned wells. The lateral branch contributed much greater to the performance than other sections in the doublet DBHE: the average temperature increase rates per unit length of different sections were 1.59, 3.53, and 1.17 °C/km after 25 years in the injection well, the lateral branch, and the production well, respectively. Employing multilateral branches can significantly improve the performance of doublet DBHEs. Besides, the outlet of the doublet DBHE had a higher static pressure than the inlet due to the thermosiphon effect. A higher production temperature led to a lower static pressure difference between the inlet and outlet of the doublet DBHE. Using doublet DBHEs, abandoned wells in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin near Hinton can work as a heat source either for direct use or power generation.

Keywords: Geothermal energy; Deep borehole heat exchanger (DBHE); Multilateral branch; Abandoned petroleum wells (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148121007370
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:176:y:2021:i:c:p:115-134

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2021.05.061

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().