| Abstract |
The territory of Belarus is located in geographical center of Europe. In geologic respect it belongs to the western part of the East European Platform. The Precambrian crystalline basement is hidden under the platform cover within the whole area of the country. There are no visible geothermal manifestations such as geysers, fumaroles, mud volcanoes, etc. During a few decades, geothermal investigations were fulfilled in the country. In result of these works, a number of geothermal maps were prepared covering the studied territory. Among them are temperature distribution maps compiled for the a number of depths starting from of 100 m within the whole territory of the country till 4 km within the Pripyat Trough, which is the deepest sedimentary basin in the southeastern part of Belarus, as well as maps of geothermal gradient, heat flow density and geothermal resources. Since the time elapsed after the World Geothermal Congress 2015 held in Melbourne, Australia the Geothermal Atlas of Belarus was published. The density of geothermal resources for a number of geothermal horizons range from dozens of kg.o.e./m2 for shallow depths till a few t.o.e./m2 in deep horizsons of the Pripyat Trough. Some of resources are exploited in a number of localities mainly using small heat pump geothermal installations irregularly distributed within the territory of the country. No high enthalpy geothermal steam was revealed within the platform cover. Preliminary estimates show that a depths at which the temperatures reaches of 150–180 ºC only inside the crystalline basement at the depth 8 12 km. The maximal temperature recorded at the base of the platform cover was around 140 ºC at the vertical depth of 6.4 km in the deepest in the region Predrechitsa-1 inclined borehole. Around 300 geothermal installations were constructed and used all over the country starting from the middle of nineties of the past century with installed capacity around 10 MWth and a few more geothermal heating systems are under construction. All available installations are used for space heating and sometimes simultaneously to heat warm water. The biggest geothermal installation of 1 MWth was put into operation at the Greenhouse Complex “Berestyeâ€, located at the eastern suburb of Brest town not far from the Belarus-Poland state border. All heat pump installations excluding the latter one are using shallow depth intervals of the platform cover with rather low-enthalpy geothermal resources. |