Jiangsu Haifa Machinery Manufacturing Co., Ltd.

Haifa High-Temperature Pumps for Geothermal Supercritical CO₂ Heat Extraction

In the field of geothermal resource development, traditional water-based heat extraction methods have long been plagued by equipment corrosion, scaling, and efficiency degradation under high-temperature and high-pressure environments. Mr. Wang (pseudonym), the project manager of a geothermal power project, once admitted that over the past three years, shutdowns for maintenance due to pump seal failures alone had occurred more than six times, with each repair cycle lasting up to two weeks, directly dragging down the annual power generation utilization rate. Such pain points are not isolated cases, especially in deep hot dry rock and Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) projects, where the medium temperature often exceeds 400°C and pressure reaches over 20MPa, making it difficult for conventional pump sets to perform reliably. To address this scenario, Haifa has launched a specialized application solution for high-temperature pumps in supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) heat extraction systems. Supercritical carbon dioxide offers advantages such as low viscosity, high diffusivity, and excellent heat transfer properties, enabling more efficient heat exchange in geothermal reservoirs. However, it imposes higher requirements on the sealing, temperature and pressure resistance, and cavitation resistance of pumping equipment. Haifa high-temperature pumps utilize special alloy flow components and dynamic sealing structures. In laboratory simulated conditions, they have operated continuously for over 8,000 hours without leakage or performance degradation. In actual deployment, the pump set was installed in the closed-loop circuit of an EGS demonstration project, responsible for pressurizing and transporting sCO₂ from the injection well to the thermal reservoir, and then back to the surface heat exchanger via the production well, with the medium temperature stable in the range of 380-420°C throughout the process. The implementation was not achieved overnight. In the early stages of the project, the team addressed pump inlet pressure fluctuations by adding a pre-stabilization device and an adaptive control system to ensure that sCO₂ remained in a single-phase stable state near the critical point. Meanwhile, by optimizing the hydraulic design of the impeller, the pump's rated efficiency was increased to over 78%, approximately 5 percentage points higher than the average level of sCO₂ circulation pumps. Mr. Wang reported that after the modification, the number of system start-stop cycles was reduced by 70%, the vibration value of the pump set under full-load conditions remained consistently below 1.5mm/s, and the equipment maintenance cycle was extended from three to one year. From the perspective of customer benefits, this solution not only resolves the pain point of insufficient equipment reliability under high temperature and pressure but also directly reduces the total lifecycle cost of the project. Taking this EGS demonstration project an example, after adopting Haifa high-temperature pumps, the average annual unplanned downtime decreased from 96 hours to less than 12 hours, and the annual operation and maintenance cost per pump was reduced by approximately 40%. Additionally, the sCO₂ cycle itself features lower pressure loss and higher thermal efficiency. Combined with the stable output of the pump set, the overall power generation efficiency of the system improved by about 8%-12% compared to water-based solutions. Haifa will continue to deepen its presence in the fields of geothermal energy and supercritical fluid applications, promoting the reliable operation of high-temperature pumps in more extreme operating conditions. (Source: Company News | Editor: Haifa Editorial Department)

Jsu Haifa Machinery Manufacturing Co., Ltd. was restructured from Jingjiang Stainless Steel Pump and Valve Factory, a subsidiary of Jiangsu Ligong Group Co., Ltd. and the Iron and Steel Research Institute of the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry, established in 1958. The company primarily produces API610 chemical process pumps - OH1 pumps, OH2 pumps, OH3 pumps, OH4, BB1 pumps, BB2 pumps, BB3, BB4, BB5 multistage pumps, VS1, VS4 VS5, VS6 barrel casing pumps, HES type chemical process pumps, chemical pumps, petrochemical pumps, sixth-generation ultra-low carbon stainless steel high-quality leak-free molten urea pumps, urea hydrolyzer feed pumps, high-temperature asphalt pumps, pitot tube pumps, rotary jet pumps, molten salt pumps, vertical sump pumps, magnetic drive pumps, low-temperature liquid hydrogen pumps, high-temperature nitric acid magnetic drive pumps, magnetic drive pumps for conveying solid-containing media, industrial pumps, canned motor pumps, slurry pumps, titanium tetrachloride pumps, self-priming pumps, lined fluorine pumps, sandwich-lined fluorine pumps, leak-free pumps, alkali pumps, oil pumps, axial flow pumps, printing and dyeing pumps, dyeing and finishing pumps, Ti alloy pumps, C-276 material, Hastelloy, 316L, forced circulation pumps, special pumps for filter presses, long-shaft vertical sump pumps, CQC first-level energy efficiency chemical pumps, high-pressure descaling industrial pumps, and Chinese chemical pumps. www.jslgpump.com Contact number: 13905263417 E-mail: jslgpump@gmail.com E-mail: jsareva@163.com