Looking for high performance geothermal wells or bore hole heat exchangers?
The Canopus Directional Steel Shot Drilling (DSSD) technology can drill geothermal structures that boost well production. The DSSD technology can be applied at any depth and benefits both shallow, deep, and ultra deep geothermal developments.
The three figures below show geothermal reservoir structures that can be drilled particularly well with DSSD.
Shallow
Canopus’ solution: Curved Bore hole Heat Exchangers (BHE) with a length up to 580 m producing three times more heating/cooling than standard, much shorter vertical BHEs. The Canopus drilling assembly steers the bit along a curved trajectory away from the other BHEs.
The benefits of the Canopus design are a small footprint, access to large subsurface volume with less BHEs, reduced overall construction cost, and a higher energy efficiency per BHE. Furthermore, the design of the steered BHEs can be optimized for subsurface geology and groundwater flow if applicable.
Deep Geothermal
Canopus’ solution: The DSSD technology of Canopus steers the bit without sacrificing rate of penetration or horizontal reach. The DSSD technology can also use the erosive jets to kick-off out of an open hole and drill branched, multilateral structures.
The benefits of the Canopus’ multilaterals for deep geothermal are increased heat production of up to a factor three per doublet well, and an increased chance to access good reservoirs and faults. The DSSD technology offers various other well construction possibilities, like boosting the production of existing wells.
Ultra Deep Geothermal
Canopus’ solution: Ultra deep geothermal extracts heat from hard tight rock beyond 4000 m depth. The wells need a very good reservoir connectivity which requires a tremendous amount of multilateral drilling. DSSD seems to be a highly suitable directional drilling technology.
The Canopus DSSD technology for ultra deep closed loop geothermal developments can probably reach larger depths and drill further into very hot reservoirs than any other directional drilling technology. DSSD would have to be combined with insulated drill pipe and continuous circulation for cooling the directional electronics.
The DSSD technology of Canopus is a balanced combination of erosion drilling with steel shot and mechanical Polycrystalline Diamond Cutter (PDC) bit drilling. On top of the excellent drill rate performance in any rock type, Canopus developed a low power steering method that does not reduce drill rate. The mechanical forces on the DSSD drill bit are much lower than required for conventional PDC-drilling, enabling the construction of highly productive reservoir sections that are longer and may include multiple branches (multilaterals). The DSSD technology has been verified by TNO at the Rijswijk Centre for Sustainable Geo-Energy.