Looking Forward to a Decarbonized Era: Geothermal Potential Assessment for Oil & Gas Fields in Italy

The target of this work is to produce a vision of the geothermal potential stored in the depleted oil & gas fields in Italy, by using the available information provided by the Ministry of Economic Development, the published data on hydrocarbon fields, and the estimated temperature at depth from the Italian National Geothermal Database. Five most promising fields have been selected and the volume method has been applied to assess their geothermal potential. Then a probabilistic approach has been adopted to obtain not a single value but a distribution of values of the technical potential TP. The results indicate that the available heat in hydrocarbons fields is encouraging and it is fundamental to analyze the production capacities of the existing wells to have a clearer idea of the possible uses of this existing and wasted heat.