The EGS Soultz Project (France): From Reservoir Development to Electricity Production.
2009
Over two decades of research and development of the EGS Soultz reservoir carried out with French, German and Swiss governmental and European funding, a pilot geothermal power plant has been built by a French-German industrial consortium. The drilling of various exploration and geothermal boreholes at great depth, the deepest penetration into crystalline rock in France, has yielded fundamental insights into the geology, nature of fracturing, fluid geochemistry, temperature and hydraulic properties of deep crystalline rock masses. After the drilling operations, all the wells were hydraulically stimulated as well as chemically stimulated. Several circulation tests were done and showed encouraging results. The 3-well system was circulated in 2005 under buoyancy drive for 5 months with re-injection in the central well GPK-3 and production from the two outer wells, GPK-2 and GPK-4. This showed a good linkage between one duplet pair (GPK-3-GPK-2) but not the other (GPK-3-GPK-4). Further acidization operations on the low-productivity well, GPK-4, led to its productivity increasing to almost the same level than the other well. On surface, a binary power plant was designed and built based on an ORC technology (Organic Rankine Cycle). Surface equipments (turbine, heat exchanger, filtering system) and a corrosion loop as well as two different types of down-hole pumps (Line Shaft Pump-LSP, Electro Submersible Pump-ESP) were installed respectively on surface and in the production wells in 2008. The on-going Soultz project has been able to produce the first kWh of electricity in June 2008 but several components of the geothermal plant are still in their testing phase.
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