Research Outline
The use of renewable energy sources is attracting attention as a way to achieve carbon neutrality. This research group is focusing on geothermal power generation, one type of renewable energy, which extracts energy from underground hydrothermal reservoirs. Currently operating geothermal power plants utilize subsurface fluids with temperatures below 350°C that exist relatively close to the earth's surface, but they have the problem of limited power output. Supercritical geothermal fluid, an underground fluid in a supercritical state at high temperature and high pressure, is attracting attention as a next-generation geothermal resource that can solve this problem of power output. Since supercritical geothermal fluids have much higher energy than fluids below 350°C, supercritical geothermal power generation using supercritical geothermal fluids has the potential to significantly increase power generation compared to conventional geothermal power generation. However, since supercritical geothermal fluid exists at depths of several kilometers below the surface, it has been difficult to determine its mindistribution. On the other hand, it is necessary to understand the subsurface mindistribution of supercritical geothermal fluid for the future development of high-power geothermal power plants using supercritical geothermal fluid.
