Development, and Operation of Geothermal Reservoirs - MeProRisk

MeProRisk was a joint project of five university institutes at RWTH Aachen University, Free University Berlin, and Kiel University. Two partners, namely Geophysica Beratunggesellschaft mbH (Aachen) and RWE Dea AG (Hamburg) presented the industrial side. It was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF).


The key idea of this project was to understand the development of a given reservoir as an iterative process. Starting from existing geological and geophysical data, conceptual models were designed which have been used for first numerical simulations. The models were progressively refined by including reliable rock properties and geological structures from seismic interpretation. This improved iteratively the model and allowed robust estimates of rock physical properties and their uncertainties.


Within our subproject we estimated geothermal relevant parameters in the laboratory and in the borehole scale. This basis data was integrated with hydraulic and seismic experiments to provide a 3D reservoir model. Hitherto we focussed on two different type locations in Germany. These were (1) the crystalline basement in South Germany and (2) the Rotliegend formation and volcanic rocks in the Northern German Sedimentary Basin.


For these typelocations we developed methods to characterize and to predict thermal and hydraulic properties. The studies were performed at different scales and required an integration of small scale laboratory data, well logging data and large scale hydraulic tests and seismic data sets. In the frame of this project Geophysica assessed the thermal physical properties of the different locations and developed methods to deduce representative input parameters for reservoir and temperature models.


Finally this study ended up in a multi-scale implementation of the borehole and its direct environment into a 3-D reservoir model. For this purpose we provided the basic data which was suitable for the model calculations.






Project Partner



MeProRisk Abschlussbericht (10 MB)

Applied Geophysics and Geothermal Energy, RWTH Aachen


Institut für Hochleistungsrechnen, Virtuelle Realität, RWTH Aachen 


Institut für Mathematik, Kontinuierliche Optimierung, RWTH Aachen


Institut für Geophysik, AG Seismik, FU Berlin


Institut für Angewandte Geophysik, Universität Kiel