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 Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS)


The Download: creating the perfect baby, and carbon removal's lofty promises

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Meta has taken down a group dedicated to tracking ICE officers' movements An emerging field of science is seeking to use cell analysis to predict what kind of a person an embryo might eventually become. Some parents turn to these tests to avoid passing on devastating genetic disorders that run in their families. A much smaller group, driven by dreams of Ivy League diplomas or attractive, well-behaved offspring, are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to optimize for intelligence, appearance, and personality. But customers of the companies emerging to provide it to the public may not be getting what they're paying for. This story is from our forthcoming print issue, which is all about the body. Plus, you'll also receive a free digital report on nuclear power.


Deep learning forecasts the spatiotemporal evolution of fluid-induced microearthquakes

Chung, Jaehong, Manga, Michael, Kneafsey, Timothy, Mukerji, Tapan, Hu, Mengsu

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Microearthquakes (MEQs) generated by subsurface fluid injection record the evolving stress state and permeability of reservoirs. Forecasting their full spatiotemporal evolution is therefore critical for applications such as enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), CO$_2$ sequestration and other geo-engineering applications. We present a transformer-based deep learning model that ingests hydraulic stimulation history and prior MEQ observations to forecast four key quantities: cumulative MEQ count, cumulative logarithmic seismic moment, and the 50th- and 95th-percentile extents ($P_{50}, P_{95}$) of the MEQ cloud. Applied to the EGS Collab Experiment 1 dataset, the model achieves $R^2 >0.98$ for the 1-second forecast horizon and $R^2 >0.88$ for the 15-second forecast horizon across all targets, and supplies uncertainty estimates through a learned standard deviation term. These accurate, uncertainty-quantified forecasts enable real-time inference of fracture propagation and permeability evolution, demonstrating the strong potential of deep-learning approaches to improve seismic-risk assessment and guide mitigation strategies in future fluid-injection operations.


HEIMDALL: a grapH-based sEIsMic Detector And Locator for microseismicity

Bagagli, Matteo, Grigoli, Francesco, Bacciu, Davide

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we present a new deep-learning model for microseismicity monitoring that utilizes continuous spatiotemporal relationships between seismic station recordings, forming an end-to-end pipeline for seismic catalog creation. It employs graph theory and state-of-the-art graph neural network architectures to perform phase picking, association, and event location simultaneously over rolling windows, making it suitable for both playback and near-real-time monitoring. As part of the global strategy to reduce carbon emissions within the broader context of a green-energy transition, there has been growing interest in exploiting enhanced geothermal systems. Tested in the complex geothermal area of Iceland's Hengill region using open-access data from a temporary experiment, our model was trained and validated using both manually revised and automatic seismic catalogs. Results showed a significant increase in event detection compared to previously published automatic systems and reference catalogs, including a $4 M_w$ seismic sequence in December 2018 and a single-day sequence in February 2019. Our method reduces false events, minimizes manual oversight, and decreases the need for extensive tuning of pipelines or transfer learning of deep-learning models. Overall, it validates a robust monitoring tool for geothermal seismic regions, complementing existing systems and enhancing operational risk mitigation during geothermal energy exploitation.


Regression-based reduced-order models to predict transient thermal output for enhanced geothermal systems

Mudunuru, M. K., Karra, S., Harp, D. R., Guthrie, G. D., Viswanathan, H. S.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The goal of this paper is to assess the utility of Reduced-Order Models (ROMs) developed from 3D physics-based models for predicting transient thermal power output for an enhanced geothermal reservoir while explicitly accounting for uncertainties in the subsurface system and site-specific details. Numerical simulations are performed based on Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) of model inputs drawn from uniform probability distributions. Key sensitive parameters are identified from these simulations, which are fracture zone permeability, well/skin factor, bottom hole pressure, and injection flow rate. The inputs for ROMs are based on these key sensitive parameters. The ROMs are then used to evaluate the influence of subsurface attributes on thermal power production curves. The resulting ROMs are compared with field-data and the detailed physics-based numerical simulations. We propose three different ROMs with different levels of model parsimony, each describing key and essential features of the power production curves. ROM-1 is able to accurately reproduce the power output of numerical simulations for low values of permeabilities and certain features of the field-scale data, and is relatively parsimonious. ROM-2 is a more complex model than ROM-1 but it accurately describes the field-data. At higher permeabilities, ROM-2 reproduces numerical results better than ROM-1, however, there is a considerable deviation at low fracture zone permeabilities. ROM-3 is developed by taking the best aspects of ROM-1 and ROM-2 and provides a middle ground for model parsimony. It is able to describe various features of numerical simulations and field-data. From the proposed workflow, we demonstrate that the proposed simple ROMs are able to capture various complex features of the power production curves of Fenton Hill HDR system. For typical EGS applications, ROM-2 and ROM-3 outperform ROM-1.