A Method to Recover Useful Geothermal - Reservoir Parameters from Production Characteristic Curves

In this paper we develop and demonstrate a method to estimate the reservoir pressure, a mass productivity index, and a thermal power productivity index for vertical water-fed geothermal wells, from its production characteristic (also called output) curves. In addition, the method allows to estimate the radius of influence of the well, provided that a value of the reservoir transmisivity is available. structure of the present method is: first, the measured wellhead mass flowrate; and pressures are transformed to downhole conditions by means of a numerical simulator; then, the computed downhole variables are fitted to a simple radial model that predicts the sandface flowrate in terms of the flowing pressure. For demonstration, the method was applied to several wells from the Cerro Prieto geothermal field. found very good agreement of the model withthis ample set of field data. of our method are that it provides a way to retrieve important reservoir information from usually available production characteristic curves, that it works from easily and accurately taken wellhead measurements, and that its results address the two main aspects of geothermal resource utilization, namely, mass and heat product ion. The basic