| Title | Towards Visualization of the Structural Setting in the Los Humeros Geothermal Field Using Gravity |
|---|---|
| Authors | Natalia CORNEJO, Eva SCHILL, Sebastian HELD, Domenico LIOTTA, Andreas BROGI, Luigi PICCARDI, Marco PEREZ, Jonathan CARRILLO, Ingo SASS |
| Year | 2020 |
| Conference | World Geothermal Congress |
| Keywords | super-hot geothermal systems, gravity, reservoir characterization, structural setting |
| Abstract | The GEMex project addresses different challenges in the development of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) and Superhot Geothermal Systems (SHGS) in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Although being located in similar tectonic settings, the geothermal conditions in Acoculco and Los Humeros differ strongly resulting in an EGS and a SHGS, respectively. The Los Humeros field is currently under conventional exploitation. North of the current production area, higher temperatures more than 380 °C are expected. The Acoculco site presents temperatures more than 300 °C at a depth of 2 km, but a reservoir is not identified. The main goal of this work is to visualize and characterize the reservoir conditions using gravity data. To accomplish this, we measured and processed a total of 344 gravity stations in Los Humeros and 84 stations in Acoculco at a local scale. In Los Humeros, the Bouguer anomaly shows a clear trend of decreasing gravity from the NE to the SW, fitting with the Bouguer anomaly of the regional gravity data, where a minimum gravity anomaly was found in the center of the caldera. At the reservoir level in Acoculco, an area of high-density anomaly coincides with an area of low permeability, revealed by the absence of water reservoir at depth were two not productive exploration wells were drilled (Peiffer et al. 2014b). |