Geospatial exploration of geothermal reservoirs in the Souss Massa regions of the anti-atlas and Moroccan Sahara

Abstract

Geothermal reservoirs refer to any heat stored, naturally, in the earth's crust; it is considered as resource coming from a natural complex depending on the geological, geophysical aspect and territories geochemistry. Although this natural resource remains distinguished by his characters to be a renewable, ecological, universal and sustainable mining energy, it stills not, yet, sufficiently exploitable worldwide (El Bouazouli et al., 2020). The same finding was brought up in Moroccan context, despite the presence of some hot resources and capitalizable scientific research to develop this potential. Prospecting for underground geothermal resources is an expensive project that deserves to mobilize scientific and technical methods in order to overcome this risky impasse. Thus, Geomatics has been used, drawing on Remote Sensing for geo-spatial exploration in order to guide prospecting through the development of geothermal deposits potential maps at very low and medium depth on Moroccan territories (El Bouazouli et al., 2019).Furthermore, we explore smart tools to support short and long-term decision-making in terms of creating of clean energy mix and complementary mining energy as well as investment in energy exploration operations. And, as an experiment, we chose for this study, areas distributed mainly in the Moroccan Sahara and the Souss Massa Region, known, probably, by a potentially high geothermal gradient, and therefore constituting geothermal energy reservoirs. As for the exploration methodology adopted, it consists in processing of the imageries: LANDSAT 8, MODIS AND ASTER, in order to extract exploitation indices such as the surface temperature, the layer of lineaments and cracks density, and evidence of hydrothermal alteration that may indicate geothermal activity. The correlation between these three factors, will lead us to conclude that the Moroccan Sahara area is considered as one of the most potential geothermal reservoir areas in Morocco.In short, the application of remote sensing and GIS will allow us to calculate surface temperature as well as hydrothermal alteration indices and lineaments to identify promising areas for low-energy geothermal (Zhang et al, 2007; El Bouazouli et al., 2020), (Ouzzaouit et al., 2017)[13]. Admittedly, the use of electromagnetic waves, in particular infrared, will have made it possible to identify potential geothermal sites on the three pilot sites Lagouera, Guergarat and Al Mahbes in the Moroccan Sahara.