Highlight 1 – Criterion presented about hard to abate sectors such as petro-chemical manufacturing along the Gulf Coast. Bridget Silva also plugged the regional interest groups within Geothermal Rising.
Highlight 2 –Chris Ellis (operator of the Coso geothermal plant) moderated a panel about cross industry collaboration and had Kelly Blake (president of Geothermal Rising), April Rider (Repsol), Sarah Jewett (Fervo), and Patrick Hanson (Expro). It was a friendly discussion that talked about the different lenses those within the industry view steps forward with geothermal, and a plug was made for the Capital Hill Day by Kelly Blake who noted TxGEA, Geothermal Rising, Project inner Space will all be there.
Highlight 3 – Susan Nash presented on repurposing wells where she emphasized the importance of micro-seimic monitoring while talking about permeability and porosity.
“It’s important to have an ongoing and current understanding of your stress regime, and you must know that you may need to change your injection points around to manage the stress. Otherwise, you’ll have what happened in Oklahoma, where it became one of the most seismically active places in the world thanks to not understanding what was happening with injection. So, if you are suddenly going to convert a number of areas into water flows where you’re harvesting heat as well as oil, you may need to change the volume of the amount of water that’s being introduced in order to make sure you know that the stresses are equally distributed and you’re not triggering earthquakes. Maybe you think, “oh this is some minor earthquake who cares” but it will matter because it will affect the integrity of your equipment too.”
Highlight 4 – Jeremy Goodwin from Geothermal Core presented on the future of geothermal in Texas. He pointed out the numerous oil and gas wells and the abundance of geologic data from this exploration, providing background information we don’t have in other areas. With this knowledge and hydraulic fracturing in our toolbox, geothermal is a resource for Texas.
Highlight 5 – Trenton Cladouhos from Alta Rock Energy /Manzana talking about Super Critical EGS.
Highlight 6 – panel on Marketing geothermal with Kelly Blake, Jay Egg, Sarah Jewet, and Hans Christian Freitag. They talked about public perception, educating the masses vs educating policy makers, and what their ideal geothermal commercial would be.