| Abstract |
Downhole investigations in high temperature geothermal wells are often restricted by tool availability, since most logging instrumentation used in geothermal applications are designed for oil and gas applications. On-going and planned scientific projects in Iceland and New Zealand require downhole gauges tolerating temperatures up to and even beyond 400°C, where only a small selection of specialized instruments are available to the geothermal community. The target for geothermal energy extraction in supercritical geothermal wells is 400-600°C. In the foreseeable future, a larger set of advanced borehole instruments, tolerating temperatures up to 300°C, will be required. Long-term deployment of production monitoring tools at temperatures up to 300°C can also be foreseen, in particular in enhanced geothermal reservoirs engineered for heat extraction from magma sources. Currently, work is on-going to identify the most urgent instruments required by the geothermal community at high temperatures within the ‘International Partnership for Geothermal Technology’ (IPGT)1. Some of these instruments are mentioned here. |