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    • Final Report: Low Temperature Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis for the Appalachian Basin

    Metadata Updated: January 20, 2025

    This is a final report summarizing a two-year (2014-16) DOE funded Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis of the Low-Temperature resources of the Appalachian Basin of New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Collaborators included Cornell University, Southern Methodist University, and West Virginia University. As a result of the research, 'play fairways' were identified for further study, based on four risk criteria: 1) the Thermal Resource Quality, 2) the Natural Reservoir Quality, 3) the Risk of Seismic Activity, and the 4) Utilization Viability.

    In addition to the final report document, this submission includes project 'memos' referred to throughout the report. Many of these same memos are also provided in the submissions with the detailed data products accompanying the relevant risk factor (thermal, reservoir, seismicity, and utilization). This report updates a preliminary version submitted in late 2015 (Submission 559 - See "Reservoir Analysis 2015" below)

    This file presents the Final Report and Supporting Documents for a Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis of the Appalachian Basin sectors of New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The purpose of this Department of Energy funded effort was to assess the potential for viable low temperature (50-150 degrees C) geothermal energy exploration and development using the methods of Play Fairway Analysis. The resources analyzed occur at depths of 1000 m and greater below the surface, and the application scenarios considered are for direct utilization of the heat. This report illustrates the lateral variability of each of the four risk criteria. This report also illustrates multiple alternative methods to combine those factors in order to communicate the estimated overall favorability of geothermal development. Uncertainty in the risk estimation is also quantified. Based on these metrics, geothermal plays in the Appalachian Basin were identified as potentially viable for a variety of direct-use-heat applications. The methodologies developed in this project and presented in this report may be applied in other sedimentary basins as a foundation for geothermal resource, risk, and uncertainty assessment. Accompanying this report is an Appendix that describes in greater detail the methods used in the analysis, and 17 other technical memos that document criteria, methods and decisions on which the final product was built.

    Access & Use Information

    Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: Creative Commons Attribution

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    Dates

    Metadata Created Date January 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date January 20, 2025

    Metadata Source

    Harvested from OpenEI data.json

    Other Data Resources

    Additional Metadata

    Resource Type Dataset
    Metadata Created Date January 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date January 20, 2025
    Publisher Cornell University
    Maintainer
    Identifier https://data.openei.org/submissions/7080
    Data First Published 2015-11-18T07:00:00Z
    Data Last Modified 2021-07-07T21:15:38Z
    Public Access Level public
    Bureau Code 019:20
    Metadata Context https://openei.org/data.json
    Metadata Catalog ID https://openei.org/data.json
    Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
    Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
    Data Quality True
    Datagov Dedupe Retained 20250120155001
    Harvest Object Id 0899412a-8199-4be6-87b5-82a579695bad
    Harvest Source Id 7cbf9085-0290-4e9f-bec1-91653baeddfd
    Harvest Source Title OpenEI data.json
    Homepage URL https://gdr.openei.org/submissions/899
    License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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    Program Code 019:006
    Projectlead Holly Thomas
    Projectnumber EE0006726
    Projecttitle Low Temperature Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis for the Appalachian Basin
    Source Datajson Identifier True
    Source Hash a95ee7d167f0ab8672e5003020c95730707d5aa9e27cb418aabd5d9e66ef73f3
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