Appalachian Basin Play Fairway Analysis: Revised 2016 Combined Risk Factor Analysis

This submission contains information used to compute the combined risk factors for deep geothermal energy opportunities in the Appalachian Basin, in the context of a the Play Fairway Analysis project. The risk factors are sedimentary rock reservoir quality, thermal resource quality, potential for induced seismicity, and utilization for direct-use heating of neighborhoods. The methods used to combine the risk factors included taking the average, the geometric mean, and the minimum of the four risk factors. Combined risk maps are provided for three different sedimentary rock reservoir metrics. Combined risk maps are also provided for the three geologic risk factors alone (thermal, reservoir, and seismic), and for the three risk factors that exclude reservoir quality (utilization, seismicity, and thermal qualities).

The 2015 data submission should be visited to obtain associated shapefiles, which include:
1) definition of the High and Medium priority play fairways (Inner_Fairway, and Outer_Fairway),
2) definition of the US Census Places (usCensusPlaces),
3) places (cities) of interest in the region (Places_of_Interest) identified as geothermal play fairways,
4) the point centers of the raster cells (Raster_Center_Locations), and
5) locations of industries and special-use communities (e.g., colleges and military bases) identified as low temperature heat users (Industries).

The 2015 submission also includes:
1) a methodology memo that explains how the risk factors were combined (GPFA-AB_combining_risk_factors.pdf),
2) the earthquake-based seismic risk map, and
3) supporting information with details of the calculations or processing used in generating these data files. More details on each file are given in the spreadsheet "list_of_contents.xlsx" in the folder "Supporting_Information".

Code used to calculate values is available at https://github.com/calvinwhealton/geothermal_pfa under the folder "combining_metrics". Note that the 2016 code is currently under the branch named "combining_metrics_2016" in the folder called "combining_metrics". This branch may be merged with the master branch in the future.

Many files contained within this submission update and replace the indicated files contained in:
Cornell University. (2015). Risk Factor Analysis in Low-Temperature Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis for the Appalachian Basin (GPFA-AB) [data set]. Retrieved from https://gdr.openei.org/submissions/622. doi:10.15121/1261942