COMPASS Project Meeting and Workshop in Norway

Sustainable and cost-efficient Concepts enabling green power production from supercritical and superhot geothermal wells (COMPASS) project meeting and workshop was held on November 7-8, 2023 at Trondheim, Norway. The meeting was hosted by SINTEF, one of the consortium members of the Project.

Presentations, discussions and decisions:

The COMPASS consortium contains a diverse team of major geothermal research institutes and leading industry players. This combination ensures cross-fertilisation, sharing of knowledge and experience, and seamless transfer of the novel well construction technologies by industry application.

The first day of the meeting mostly included presentations on the overviews of the work programs and detailed updates on the technical activities, the upcoming results were also discussed among the members in this session.

Fig : COMPASS work packages

The day also included a workshop titled “Replication and spillover effects”. The workshop was about identifying possible spill-over applications for potential products from COMPASS technology and methods in various geological settings and industries.

The second day of the meeting was all about an exciting visit to the SINTEF laboratory and workshop on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The visit gave opportunities to the consortium members to meet geothermal experts and discuss the know-how of deep geothermal drilling.

A couple of joint decisions were made during the meeting. One of those included the involvement of CURISTEC in arranging collaborative discussions based on work package 3, i.e. thermal stress mitigation solution. In another session, Technovative Solutions Limited (TVS) explained the updates on the Environmental Analysis and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of the project.

The next COMPASS biannual meeting is scheduled to be held in May 2024, in the UK, where Technovative Solutions Limited (TVS) plans to demonstrate the LCA tools for well completion and surface plants.

Contribution of TVS to the COMPASS project

For the COMPASS Project, Technovative Solutions Limited (TVS) is developing the Cradle-to-Gate (system boundary includes the construction phase of a product) LCA and parameterised cost models for well completion using casing and foam cementing solutions and also developing the Cradle-to-Grave (system boundary includes construction, operation & maintenance (O&M) and End of Life (EoL) Phases of a product) LCA and parameterised cost models for surface plants.

TVS presentation in the meeting

In the meeting, Dr M A Hye Chowdhury (Lead Technologist-TVS), on behalf of Technovative Solutions Limited (TVS), presented the progress update of Cost and LCA models for well completion and surface plant. The presentation included a summary of the activities of the COMPASS database management system (DBMS), resource consumption calculation pages of casings, and liners for well completion.

About COMPASS Project

The COMPASS is a Horizon Europe project that aims to develop, test and verify improved and innovative drilling and completion technologies to increase the number of economically viable high-temperature geothermal wells, and thereby reduce the environmental impact and cost associated with the provision of geothermal energy. Sustainable and cost-efficient concepts are enabling green power production from supercritical/superhot geothermal wells. Drilling geothermal wells into extremely hot conditions presents an opportunity to access new resources that traditional geothermal wells cannot reach. In addition, these wells have the potential to produce significantly more power than conventional ones, resulting in a reduction in the environmental impact of geothermal energy production.

The project will address concerns about maintaining the integrity of the well in high-temperature environments and managing the corrosive fluid chemistry. COMPASS will introduce innovative well designs to address these challenges, including developing new foam cement solutions suitable for high-temperature formations to improve well integrity and utilising cost-effective laser cladding to enhance corrosion protection inside casing pipes.

These technology developments will be enhanced with a robust well design solution addressing challenges, reducing project risk and enabling reduction of LCOE. The new well concept will enable cost-effective geothermal developments in new types of geological settings and new regions.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement nº. 101084623.