Geothermal Deep Direct Use for Turbine Inlet Cooling in East Texas

2021 U.S. Geothermal Power Production and District Heating Market Report

“…A recent study conducted by NREL investigated the techno-economic feasibility of using geothermal-sourced absorption chillers to produce chilled water for a chemical plant in East Texas. The proposed cooling system generates about 11 MW of chilled water, or 86 GWh of cooling per year (Turchi et al 2020). A 2015 study led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory proposed the development of a geothermalsourced cooling system that would provide off-site space conditioning (up to 100 miles from geothermal resources).…”

“…Four out of the six projects evaluated GDH systems(Garapati and Hause 2020; Lin et al 2019;Lowry et al 2020;and Tester et al 2019). The remaining two projects evaluated DDU for cooling(Turchi et al 2020) and for thermal energy storage (TES)(Bershaw et al 2020).In July 2020, Cornell University was selected for a follow-on grant award from DOE to fund a deep exploratory borehole in Ithaca, New York. This borehole is intended to verify the feasibility of using deep geothermal energy for a campus GDH system that would employ innovative technologies combining heat pumps with an existing district energy infrastructure.…”

Determining Geothermal Resources in Three Texas Counties

“…For more details, see Appendix A in Final Report, Batir and Richards (2020). For East Texas, we incorporated the methods used in the deep direct-use report (Batir et al 2018;Turchi et al 2020), which used thermal conductivity values based on the values of Pitman and Rowan (2012). They assigned thermal conductivity values for each formation based on the mineralogy, specifically percent sandstone, shale, silt, and limestone for Louisiana formations that extend into Texas.…”