Numerical analysis of the role of radiogenic basement on temperature distribution in the St. Lawrence Lowlands, Québec

Abstract

Active volcanic or magma-related systems possessing a high heat flow at plate margins have received attention for geothermal energy because of their high temperature at shallow depths (Capuno et al. 2010). Regions with low or medium surface heat flow in stable cratonic areas, such as in eastern Canada, have received much less attention. In some such regions, there, however, may still be potential to develop high-temperature "Hot Dry Rock" geothermal resources (summarized by Hillis et al. 2004), especially

Geothermal resource assessment of remote sedimentary basins with sparse data: lessons learned from Anticosti Island, Canada

“…Because of the poor knowledge of the Basement thermal unit properties and spatial variability, it is difficult to assess the realism of these values. Though the heat generation rate calculated for the Basement thermal unit falls within values used by other authors for the Precambrian basement of the Grenville Province such as Liu et al (2018), values of 1.64 µW m −3 for the optimistic scenario and 0.41 µW m −3 for the pessimistic scenarios were assigned to the Basement's heat generation rate in the 3D model.…”

“…The assumption of uniform thermal properties for the Basement thermal unit is greatly over-simplified, as it is known that the Grenville Province shows high variability in thermal properties (Liu et al 2018;Moukhsil et al 2017). The amount of data points obtained at each well was judged insufficient to determine a reliable distribution of Basement thermal unit heat generation rate with geostatistical methods.…”