Geothermal potential of the Corbetti site in Ethiopia
Wenchi crater, Ethiopia (source: flickr/ MESSAY5, creative commons)
Alexander Richter
22 Apr 2015
At a presentation given at the World Geothermal Congress, Hjalmar Eysteinsson gave a presentation about the early stages of exploration at the Corbetti site in Ethiopia.
The WGC is showcasing a lot of different projects and developments and earlier today, Hjalmar Eysteinsson gave a presentation about the early stages of exploration at the Corbetti site in Ethiopia. He mentioned that there are a handful of shallow gradient wells that have used to infer water table and that the highest temperatures in the shallow wells were around 90 C. Gas geothermometry has been done on fumaroles near the caldera and estimates say that the resource temperature oscillates between 277-360 C.
MT and TEM surveys have also been collected to make a geophysical model of the what lies under the surface. The data shows a good conductive layer interpreted as a reservoir clay cap, with a high resistive section below interpreted as the geothermal reservoir.
The main conclusions of the presentation: based on the geothermometry and the geophysical model, there could be as much as 1000 MWe potential. The initial plans for first utilization of the resources in the area will be the construction of a 70 MWe power plant.
