United Downs Deep Geothermal Project (UDDGP) in Cornwall, UK reports promising permeability

Steaming drilling mud at United Downs project site,, Cornwall (source: UDDGP/ Twitter)

Alexander Richter 19 Aug 2019

The United Deep Geothermal Project announces that with the drilling that started in November 2018 and is now complete, it sees promising permeability.

The project drilled an injection well reaching a depth of over 2,000m and the production well going to a depth in excess of 5,000m. Both wells intersected the fault at the predicted depth and the temperature at the bottom of the deeper well is around 190 centigrades, which was as expected.

Downhole measurements have confirmed that there are lots of natural fractures and early indications are that the permeability is promising.

Geothermal Engineering Limited is now ready to begin the evaluation stage of the project. During this stage, the project will carry out a series of measurements and hydraulic tests to evaluate the fault structure, make sure the wells are in good condition, and evaluate the amount of geothermal energy we can sustainably harness from the system. It is expected that this phase will take from September 2019 to the Spring of 2020.

The first part of this work will be to remove a temporary downhole packer from UD-1, carry out some more downhole ‘logging’ measurements and attempt to collect some sidewall cores. It is hoped that this will happen in October.

?Some of this work will require a small ‘workover’ drilling rig to be on site for 2 to 3 weeks to run equipment in and out of the well. This would be on a much smaller scale than the rig we used for drilling and would only operate during the daytime.

Source: UDDGP/ GEL