Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES)

Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) is a mature geothermal technology which stores thermal energy in aquifers for later use. It provides a sustainable solution to increasing energy efficiency adopted throughout Europe¹. To guide the design and development of an ATES project, we provide numerical solutions for:

• Feasibility studies that asses the thermal storage capacity of the reservoir following recent guidelines².
• Sensitivity analysis to various hydrological and thermal heterogeneities which can significantly affect performance³.
• Groundwater Contamination assessment (mostly relevant for high temperature ATES⁴).
• Optimising well placement & well operation strategies

Software

The multi-physics simulation platforms Open-CSMP++ and GEOSX can be leveraged to perform 3-dimensional thermo-hydrological simulations to evaluate the performance of the thermal reservoir and testing various hypothesis of the geological reservoir. In particular, we can provide bespoke solutions as full-time developers of Open-CSMP++, a platform frequently used for ATES^5,6.