Is soft stimulation worth its effort? Is it wise to use soft stimulation in geothermal exploration from an economical point of view? Which risk factors and uncertainties do we face while performing soft stimulation and how do they affect our project?

These and more questions will a company address before performing soft stimulation at a specific geothermal site. The use of a certain approach must be based on technological and economical evaluations, which form a “business case”. A business case combines different scenarios for a possible investment and provides fundamentals to base on decisions. A “decision analysis” is a structured approach of comparing different business cases and enables the integration of risks into the evaluation process. It allows the selection of the best possible alternative.
Within DESTRESS, decision analysis shall therefore provide the methodological framework to investigate soft stimulation and to answer the questions asked above. The techno-economic evaluation of soft stimulation shall give operators of geothermal sites the possibility to evaluate the pros and cons of this technological approach. To accomplish these goals first steps are published in Deliverable 2.1. The deliverable presents two applied methods: One descends from strategic corporate planning and is a combination of mind mapping and cross impact analysis (”dependency structure analysis”) while the other is derived from risk management (“risk analysis”).
The report submitted by WP2 will be a basis for further techno-economic investigations within DESTRESS.