Book Description

There have been two major high-temperature geothermal field developments in Iceland in the last decade; Krafla in the north-east, and Svartsengi in the south-west. These and other geothermal developments have recently been reported by Palmason et al. The Krafla field will not be discussed here, but details about the field are available in Stefansson and the power plant in Eliasson et al. Several reservoir engineering studies of the Krafla field have been published. The Svartsengi field is one of several fields on the Reykjanes Peninsula in south-west Iceland. About 15 km west of Svartsengi, on the tip of the Peninsula, the Reykjanes field is now under development, primarily for seawater chemicals production. The recently drilled Eldvorp field is located in line between these two fields, about 5 km west of Svartsengi. There are also several fields to the east of Svartsengi, at 15-20 km distance. The Svartsengi, Eldvorp, and Reykjanes fields exist in the same tectonic-volcanic environment, and are surrounded by similar geohydrological conditions, as discussed by Georgsson; see also Gudmundsson et al. and Franzson. Optimum development of these and other fields on the Reykjanes Peninsula, requires an understanding of their depletion behavior with time; that is, how the reservoir pressure falls with production. While recognizing that no two geothermal fields are alike, we also realize that an understanding of the depletion behavior of Svartsengi, for example, may prove useful in the development of other similar and nearby fields. The main purpose of this paper is to report our depletion analysis of the Svartsengi field using lumped-parameter and water influx modeling: we also report the field's production history.