Geothermal energy offers the opportunity to revolutionize the sustainable energy landscape by offering a reliable and available heat source with a small footprint. However and despites its promise, a rapid geothermal expansion has not materialized yet due to challenges with acceptance, permitting, financing complexities, equipment availability and lack of innovation.
A structured drilling sequence enables particularly on the technical side a key strategy to overcome these and other obstacles to accelerate the installation of geothermal power plants. First of all, standardization and the economics of scale is a proven method to make significant cost reductions possible. Besides cost, drilling campaigns offer longer term security for contractors and suppliers enabling them to invest in people and equipment. Longer and therefore better learning curves and more available contingencies will reduce project risks what provides more accurate cost estimates and lower insurance costs. Drilling campaigns enable stepwise introduction of innovations on well design and drilling technologies by taking steps of manageable risks. Maybe the biggest opportunity for acceleration comes from a multi-operator campaign with operators joining the sequence when their project matured enough. This way, long lead times for equipment etc. are taken out of the critical path.
This presentation will demonstrate the benefits and opportunities of using drilling campaigns and will show what it takes to enable them to be used by multiple operators.