The company is aiming to secure seven or eight engineered and conventional geothermal energy projects across Spain to service expanding market demand for hot water and electricity.
In the latest licence awards, Petratherm has been granted three new geothermal exploration licences (GELs) – El Vallejo, El Regacho and Monte Grande – in northern Spain.
These cover about 432 square kilometres of the Almazan Basin, in the Castilla y León region near the company’s geothermal interests around Madrid and Barcelona, according to Petratherm managing director Terry Kallis.
“The Almazan Project is an engineered geothermal system [EGS] project with the additional potential for exploiting direct-use heating from naturally-occurring hot aquifers – similar to our Madrid and Barcelona Projects,” Kallis said.
“It now gives Petratherm a substantial hot rock footprint in northern Spain where growing market demand is matched by relative project proximity to mainstream power distribution infrastructure.”
The new Almazan project area is 250km northeast of Madrid and adjacent to the high-capacity 400-kilovolt power transmission line servicing northern regions and the township of Almazan, according to Kallis.
“This elevates potential commercial outcomes on a near-term rather than long-term basis and provides a scope of exploration and development work which can be harnessed within one general province bounded by Madrid, Barcelona and Almazan,” he said.
The Almazan Basin is one of the deepest Mesozoic-Tertiary Basins within the Iberian Peninsula, and the latest GELs awarded are located over the area of the Basin which combines the thickest section of sediments together with a significant gravity anomaly to target the best commercial EGS prospects in the region.
The basin is bounded on its eastern margin by large faults along the base of the Iberian Range. Thermal springs at the townships of Alhama de Aragon, Deza-Embid and Jaraba are associated with the movement of hot aquifer waters from Upper Cretaceous carbonates underlying the Almazan Basin at depths of about 1000m, up these faults to the surface.
“The springs are significant because they have elevated temperatures at the surface of about 30 to 34ºC and high flow rates of 500 to 1000 litres per second,” Kallis said.
“Estimates from geo-thermometry calculations performed on these springs indicate the aquifer’s equilibrium temperature is around 110ºC – suggesting that there may be a significant heat anomaly under the basin.”
The company’s mainland geothermal interests in Spain are all EGS project areas, but it has also acquired interests in two conventional geothermal system (CGS) projects in the Spanish controlled Canary Islands – Tenerife and Gran Canaria.
