Assessment of the resource base for engineered geothermal systems in Great Britain

Background Engineered or enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) have been promoted as a technology that exploits geothermal heat and power production from regions of the crust devoid of shallow high enthalpy reservoirs (also referred to as high-grade hydrothermal resources) (e.g., MIT 2006). The status of EGS development was reviewed by Breede et al. (2013) who reported on 14 EGS projects that were generating electricity and 8 that were still under development. EGS projects to date have been developed for power generation or combined heat and power, but the ECOGI project in northern Alsace, France is the first for heat only (Baujard et al. 2015). There is no single definition for EGS. MIT (2006) consider it as an ‘engineered reservoir created to extract economical amounts of heat from low permeability and/or porosity geothermal resources and therefore includes all geothermal resources that are not in commercial production and require stimulation Abstract