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Abstract

There has been a renewed interest in the search for an indigenous, renewable, environment friendly, and sustainable energy source globally. Geothermal energy is one such green energy source that has the potential of becoming an alternate energy resource. This study attempts to understand various types of geothermal water, and their geographic distribution in India in order to identifying the underlying reservoirs by looking at their geochemical features and to identify the source of thermal water in different geothermal provinces of India. Specifically, the Himalaya, East Coast, West Coast, and West Bengal (Bakreswar), which may be able to meet the nation's energy demands. The estimated reservoir temperatures and reservoir depths are 150±10°C, and 2.11±0.2km; 120±5°C, and 1.71 ±0.17km; 100±5°C and 1.13±0.13km; 110±5°C and 1.37±0.32km for the Himalayan, west coast, West Bengal and the Odisha geothermal systems, respectively. Furthermore, we use eight crucial characteristics parameters such as heat flow, thermal gradient, curie point depth, lithology, basement depth, crustal thickness, and earthquake density, integrated using the multi-criteria decision model of the Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to estimate the potential of geothermal energy in India. The highest AHP weight has been observed in the order of heat flow (~0.252), followed by curried point depth (~0.195), thermal gradient (~0.173), and crustal thickness. (0.131) and basement depth (~0.114). We find that ~14.86% and ~21.98% of the region shows extremely high to high geothermal prospects respectively. About 27.18% shows medium geothermal prospects, whereas ~11.78% and 24.20% of the region show very low to low geothermal prospects.