Well of the Week - The Phoenix Field
Phoenix: (in classical mythology) a unique bird that lived for five or six centuries in the Arabian desert, after this time burning itself on a funeral pyre and rising from the ashes with renewed youth to live through another cycle.
The previous post in this Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week series on geothermal energy development in western Canada considered a geological setting far removed from what is typically seen by geologists in the oil and gas industry. It is, after all, hard to get further removed from sedimentary rocks than a volcanic complex. Moving a long way east and a long way north, we come to the next geothermal project in the series: Tu Deh-Kah Geothermal.
Tu Deh-Kah aims to use formation water from the depleted Clarke Lake Slave Point gas field to “develop a sustainable energy project to create a vibrant future for our people and our neighbouring communities” (from their website). Clarke Lake was discovered in 1956 and tops the list of the Ten Largest Beaverhill Lake Gas Fields (see Figure 1). As such Clarke Lake was central to the growth of the nearby town of Fort Nelson, BC. A location map of Clarke Lake relative to the Devonian of British Columbia and Alberta is provided as Figure 2.
Figure 1. Ten Largest Beaverhill Lake Gas Fields (in units of 106m3). (Oldale et al. 1994).
Figure 2. Location of Clarke Lake Gas Field. (Renaud et al., 2018).
Even the biggest pools eventually peter out. But the reservoir itself is (literally) quite hot with reservoir temperatures up to 130oC (Figure 3) and there is hope that this characteristic will allow the Clarke Lake reservoir to continue to contribute to the residents of Fort Nelson and have a second life as an energy source, one that is renewable and low in carbon emissions.
Figure 3. Clarke Lake Reservoir Temperature. (Renaud et al., 2018).
As with the Garibaldi Geothermal Energy Project, Geoscience BC funded a series of projects to understand the potential of this project; including a techno-economic assessment, a pilot project feasibility study, reservoir characterization and a reservoir model. When pioneering a new energy source, this sort of thorough review of all project aspects is invaluable and provides a template for evaluating other projects.
That is a lot of hyperlinks to click on. I will leave the decision as to which report to review in detail up to your discretion, although the more discerning readers will, of course, gravitate to the geological report. The Fort Nelson area has been particularly affected by this year’s wildfire season. Here is hoping that pursuing this project will help the recovery.
References
Arellano, R. (2018). Clarke Lake Demonstration Project Development – Engineering Pre-Feasibility of a Pilot Geothermal Power/Direct Use Facility at Clarke Lake. Geoscience BC Report 2018-003. https://www.geosciencebc.com/projects/2018-003/
Harris, N. (2015). Dynamic Geothermal Reservoir Modeling in the Clarke Lake Gas Field, Northeast British Columbia. Geoscience BC Report 2015-00. https://www.geosciencebc.com/projects/2015-001/
Oldale, H.S., Munday, R. J., Ma, K. and Meijer Drees, N. C. (1994): Devonian Beaverhill Lake Group of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin; in Geological Atlas of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, G.D. Mossop and I. Shetsen (comp.), Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists and Alberta Research Council, URL https://ags.aer.ca/publications/chapter-12-devonian-woodbend-winterburn-strata.html, [04/26/2020].
Renaud, E., Banks, J. Harris, N. and Weissenberger, J. (2018). Clarke Lake Gas Field Reservoir Characterization. Geoscience BC Report 2018-19. https://cdn.geosciencebc.com/project_data/GBCR2018-19.pdf
Palmer-Wilson, K., Walsh, W., Banks, J. and Wild, P. (2018): Techno-Economic assessment of Geothermal Energy Resources in the Sedimentary Basin in Northeastern British Columbia, Canada. Geoscience BC Report 2018-18. https://cdn.geosciencebc.com/project_data/GBCReport2018-18/GBCR2018-18_Report.pdf.
Comments