Preliminary conceptual design of commercial geopressured geothermal fuel plants

Previous feasibility studies Bechtel (1975), TRW (1975) for electric power generation utilizing geothermal resources have tended to focus primarily on the power plant and have neglected the fuel production and effluent disposal facilities. The Dow Chemical USA study (1974) for the Governor's Energy Advisory Council, State of Texas, placed equal emphasis on the power plant and the fuel plant. The study reported in Chapter II and in what follows in this chapter, also places equal emphasis on the two types of facilities. It is important that the fuel plant, the well field, the fuel processing plant, and the effluent disposal facility be the subject of a preliminary conceptual design and costing activity so that economic and net energetics analysis can be performed. The activity also serves to assess technological maturity of the fuel plant and to identify technical problems requiring further study. The resource considered was the model resource outlined in Sectio B, Chapter II. Fuel plants were outlined for three power generation plants: single-stage flash steam, two-stage flash steam, and propane secondary working fluid plant