oa Economic viability of exploiting oil wells for electricity generation in Qatar: Performance and parametric investigation

Owning to the awareness of the correlation between fossil fuel consumption and the ongoing climate changes, there is general acceptance that deploying more renewable energy resources is an urgent issue. Recently, geothermal power plant has been introduced as a smart solution to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Unlike other renewable energy resources, the available energy of geothermal energy is constant all year long. Geothermal refers to existing heat energy in deep rock and sedimentary basins. This energy can be used to drive a power turbine to generate electricity. The depth and temperature of hot rock remain the major obstacles to the commercial viability of enhanced geothermal energy. The fact that such energy is only available at high depth creates technical and economic problems. From an economic viewpoint, the high initial capital cost of geothermal power plants is the main barrier to commerciality of geothermal energy. Exploration and drilling of wells account for up to 40% of the total cost of the project. On the other side, oil wells are drilled to the depth where the temperature could be higher than 100 C. Since organic Rankine cycles (ORC) can operate between smaller temperature difference, harvesting energy from a low temperature source such as oil wells is possible. Thus, utilizing these wells means a significant part of initial capital cost of geothermal power plants can be eliminated. This way the economic viability of geothermal power plant becomes bigger. The current study presents thermodynamic and economic analyses of a binary geothermal power generation system for commercial electricity generation in Qatar. The optimal working fluid and optimal design at working conditions of Qatar are defined. The levelized cost of electricity and the payback period of geothermal POWER plant will be calculated for optimal working design.