Advances in Hot Dry Rock Geothermal Energy Mining and Utilization

Dear Colleagues, 

Climate change resulting from carbon dioxide emission due to the use of fossil fuels is the driving force behind the search for renewable clean energy resources. Among all the renewable energy resources, including solar, wind, hydro-, and tidal energies, geothermal energy is the only one that can be used as an electrical, thermal, or cooling baseload due to its stable and intermittent-free nature. However, while the current growth of geothermal energy exploitation may be steady, it is also rather slow. While wind and solar energy exploitations show exponential growth, geothermal utilization is developing rather linearly and is so far provided mainly by hydrothermal resources located in special geological settings. The deeply buried (3–10 km underground) hot dry rock (i.e., HDR) is ubiquitous and contains a huge amount of heat and should be the main source of geothermal energy. However, mining HDR heat is much more difficult than hydrothermal extraction. A universally deployable HDR heat mining and efficient utilization technology could accelerate geothermal growth.

This Special Issue titled “Advances in Hot Dry Rock Geothermal Energy Mining and Utilization” aims to gather contributions advancing the HDR heat mining and utilization technologies and to share the related up-to-date research results. Topics of interest for submission include but are not limited to:

• HDR well drilling, completion, and logging;
• Enhanced geothermal system (EGS) research and technologies;
• Reservoir engineering;
• Reservoir creation or stimulation;
• Geothermal measurement, monitoring, and simulation;
• Case study of practical EGS projects;
• Environmental and economic analysis/evaluation of HDR heat exploitation;
• Single-well HDR heat mining research and technologies;
• Geothermal heat utilization research and technologies.

Dr. Fangming Jiang
Prof. Dr. Antonio C.M. Sousa
Prof. Dr. Kamel Hooman
Dr. Wenbo Huang
Dr. Juanwen Chen
Guest Editors

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