Sustainable development of Turkey: Deployment of geothermal resources for carbon capture, utilization, and storage

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs a developing country, Turkey’s sustainable development objectives converge on robust and sustainable economic development. The increase in its energy and electricity demand is attributed to the growth of population, urbanization, and industrialization parallel to economic and social growth. Instead of fulfilling the obligation to protect the environment arising from international agreements and achieving desired sustainable development, the dependency on imported fossil fuel in electrical energy production and energy-intensive economic growth results in intensified CO2 emission as well as ironically negative economic output. Therefore, Turkey is forced to exploit its indigenous sources such as coal (which unfortunately increases atmospheric Green House Gas “GHG” emissions) and renewable resources. However, high GHG emission – mainly CO2 – of Turkey’s coal power plants impairs deployment of indigenous sources for power generation. Indeed, there is a necessity of technical approaches for higher heat extraction efficiencies and mitigation of high concentration of energy-related CO2 emission. Admittedly, “Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS)” employing conventional hydrothermal resources offers highly efficient heat extraction, geological CO2 sequestration, and utilization of CO2 for power generation rather than considering CO2 as an effluent. Although there are research gaps and lack of field scale experiment, the economic and environmental viability of implementing CCUS in Turkey can be improved by pilot or field scale projects whereby the presence of these projects commences technological and experimental advances in capturing CO2 either from geothermal power plants or indigenous coal power plants, transporting it to the proven geothermal geologic site, and generating power. Apart from this, the “CO2 – Plume Geothermal Systems (CPG)” compared to unconventional and conventional geothermal systems would commit vigorous potential for continual improvement in economic feasibility of CCUS without a guaranteed return on power generation investments in Turkey. Hence, legislations concerning incentives in CCUS would foster further improvements in the deployment of geothermal resources to pursue sustainable development in Turkey.