This document provides a brief narrative, and selected project descriptions, that represent Sandia’s history involving data, modeling, and analysis related to water, energy-water nexus, and energy-water-agriculture nexus within the context of climate change. Sandia National Laboratories has been engaged since the early-1990s with program development involving data, modeling, and analysis projects that address the interdependent issues, risks, and technology-based mitigations associated with increasing demands and stresses being placed on energy, water, and agricultural/food resources, and the related impacts on their security and sustainability in the face of both domestic and global population growth, expanding economic development, and climate change.
Modeling of heat extraction in Enhanced Geothermal Systems is presented. The study builds on recent studies on the use of directional wells to improve heat transfer between doublet injection and production wells. The current study focuses on the influence of fracture orientation on production temperature in deep low permeability geothermal systems, and the effects of directional drilling and separation distance between boreholes on heat extraction. The modeling results indicate that fracture orientation with respect to the well-pair plane has significant influence on reservoir thermal drawdown. The vertical well doublet is impacted significantly more than the horizontal well doublet.
This paper is the output from SNL’s involvement in the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), the Colorado River Energy Distributors Association (CREDA), and the Upper Colorado River Commission’s (UCRC) sponsored Phase II work to establish market and non-market values (NMV’s) of water and hydropower associated with Glen Canyon Dam (GCD) operations and the Colorado River ecosystem. It describes the purpose and need to develop a systems model for the Colorado River Basin that includes valuations in the economic, hydrologic, environmental, social, and cultural sectors. It outlines the benefits and unique features associated with such a model and provides a roadmap of how a systems model would be developed and implemented. While not meant to serve as a full development plan, the ideas and concepts herein represent what the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) research team believes is the most impactful and effective path forward to address an ever increasing complex set of problems that occur at the basin-scale and beyond.
This work was partially supported by the Sandia National Laboratories, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) fellowship program in conjunction with Texas A&M University (TAMU). The research described herein is the work of Kathryn M. Schreiner (Katie) and her advisor, Thomas S. Bianchi and represents a concise description of Katies dissertation that was submitted to the TAMU Office of Graduate Studies in May 2013 in partial fulfillment of her doctorate of philosophy degree. High Arctic permafrost soils contain a massive amount of organic carbon, accounting for twice as much carbon as what is currently stored as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, with current warming trends this sink is in danger of thawing and potentially releasing large amounts of carbon as both carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. It is difficult to make predictions about the future of this sink without knowing how it has reacted to past temperature and climate changes. This project investigated long term, fine scale particulate organic carbon (POC) delivery by the high-Arctic Colville River into Simpsons Lagoon in the near-shore Beaufort Sea. Modern POC was determined to be a mixture of three sources (riverine soils, coastal erosion, and marine). Downcore POC measurements were performed in a core close to the Colville River output and a core close to intense coastal erosion. Inputs of the three major sources were found to vary throughout the last two millennia, and in the Colville River core covary significantly with Alaskan temperature reconstructions.
This report presents the results from the hydrological, ecological, and renewable energy assessments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the ByWater Lakes site in Espanola, New Mexico for ByWater Recreation LLC and Avanyu Energy Services through the New Mexico small business assistance (NMSBA) program. Sandia's role was to assess the viability and provide perspective for enhancing the site to take advantage of renewable energy resources, improve and sustain the natural systems, develop a profitable operation, and provide an asset for the local community. Integral to this work was the identification the pertinent data and data gaps as well as making general observations about the potential issues and concerns that may arise from further developing the site. This report is informational only with no consideration with regards to the business feasibility of the various options that ByWater and Avanyu may be pursuing.
This work develops a new approach for generating stochastic permeability fields from complex three-dimensional fracture networks to support physical and economic performance analyses of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). The approach represents multiple fracture sets with different dips, orientations, apertures, spacing, and lengths by homogenizing discrete fracture permeabilities onto a regular grid using continuum methods. A previously developed algorithm is used for combining multiple fracture sets at arbitrary orientations into a full anisotropic permeability tensor for every grid block. Fracture properties for each grid cell can either be independently specified or spatially correlated using a variety of probability distributions. The generated stochastic permeability fields are used in mass and heat transport models to represent a variety of complex fracture networks to provide realistic simulations of long-term thermal performance.