Energy Conversion and Management, Vol.192, 346-358, 2019
Evaluation of an ammonia-water absorption long-distance cooling/heating system for enhanced geothermal resources
In order to solve the problem of low utilization efficiency of Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) and overlong distance between geothermal wells and energy demand sites. Based on the principle of Solution Transportation Absorption system (STA), this paper presented a long-distance cooling/heating system for dual-well EGS. Firstly, a comprehensive heat transfer model for the dual-well EGS system was established and a transport model of the long-distance STA system with no pipeline heat losses was introduced. Then, the optimization of energy outputs and maximum cooling/heating supply distance was performed. Results indicated that: although with the increase of injection flow rate and well depth, cooling and heating outputs capacity by the STA-EGS increased, however, the maximum cooling/heating supply distance decreased. Optimization of 6000 m well depth showed that optimal thermal reservoir length was about 150 m which could obtain the maximum capacity. Specially, the average maximum cooling and heating distances of the proposed system were 4 and 3.5 times that of conventional systems and the average pipe diameters of the STA-EGS decreased by 78.5%, which can greatly reduce delivery pump work and initial investment.
Keywords:Enhanced geothermal system;Thermal reservoir;Long-distance energy supply;Ammonia-water solutions