Techno-economic Analysis of Geothermal Operations Utilizing Carbon Dioxide

Sustainable geo-energy technologies, including geothermal energy, hydrogen/carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and storage, and aquifer thermal energy storage, have received significant attention from the global scientific community and industry due to their pivotal roles in achieving international decarbonization targets. While numerous stand-alone simulation tools to assess the feasibility of these geo-energy systems have been developed, existing tools often focus on simulating individual components, such as subsurface, wellbore, surface, and economic. Relying solely on such tools tends to overlook the comprehensive techno-economic evaluation of these integrated geo-energy systems. Although some simulation tools with integrated modeling capabilities exist, their flexibility and extendibility to various geo-energy systems remain limited. We present TANGO, an acronym for Techno-economic ANalysis of Geo-energy Operations, which is a newly developed integrated techno-economic simulation tool designed to offer flexibility, allowing for a comprehensive evaluation of various geo-energy operations across different fidelity levels. The applications of TANGO to a series of numerical examples of geothermal systems utilizing carbon dioxide (e.g. CO₂ Plume Geothermal – CPG), ranging from rapid site screening with the low fidelity modeling capability to detailed simulation studies using the high-fidelity modeling capability, will be presented to demonstrate TANGO’s distinctive features and capabilities.