Kizildere

History

The Kizildere geothermal field is located in the East of Büyük Menderes graben in Western Anatolia, Turkey.

It was discovered in 1968 as the first site with potential geothermal energy source in Turkey. The geothermal field is made up of three main reservoirs:

  1. The upper reservoir within the Pliocene limestones of the Sazak Formation
  2. The intermediate reservoir within the Palaeozoic marble–quartzite–schist intercalations of the Iğdecik Formation
  3. The deep reservoir hosted within the gneisses and quartzites that are intercalated with, and underlie, the schists.

The geothermal system has been in production since 1984. Reinjection of the produced fluid, which is depleted in CO2 and cooler, started in 2002 in an effort to maintain the reservoir pressure. The geothermal fluid at Kizildere carries a significant amount of dissolved CO2 (over 3% by weight depending on depth).

Project activities


In order to achieve its stated objectives, SUCCEED project will take advantage of the already existing deep well infrastructure at Hellisheidi and  Kizildere to test the new monitoring technoloies with two different CO2 injection techniques.

Currently, the Kizildere site re-injects ~200 tonnes/hour/well spent geothermal fluid at 110℃ in to the reservoir. The Linde CO2 plant, which started operation in November 2015, derives the CO2 from the Kizildere geothermal plant via pipelines, purifies it and liquefies it as product. The plant has a capacity of 240 tonnes/day, however, only a quarter of this capacity is currently utilised in the open market as food grade CO2. It has been agreed with Linde that up to 80 tonnes/day CO2 can be supplied to the SUCCEED project for injection in the field for the purposes of the project.

The project will use an existing well at Kizildere to inject CO2 which has been produced and captured, but is normally mostly vented to the atmosphere, into the reservoir at supercritical state. This is aimed at enhancing the pressure in the reservoir as the means to “use” as well as “store” the produced CO2, providing a cost effective, low environmental impact and resource‐efficient coupled geothermal-CCUS technology. The site will provide the only functioning field-scale pilot project of supercritical CO2 injection into a geothermal field in a carbonate reservoir system, with unique opportunities for testing and development of the new monitoring technologies and systems.

The project will also use the work at Kizildere investigate if CO2 storage in carbonate rocks is feasible and verifiable, enabling the validation of much talked about CO2 storage opportunities world-wide.