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Combined Effects of Thermal Perturbation and In-situ Stress on Heat Transfer in Fractured Geothermal Reservoirs

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A Correction to this article was published on 25 March 2022

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Abstract

We develop a new fully coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) model to investigate the combined effects of thermal perturbation and in-situ stress on heat transfer in two-dimensional fractured rocks. We quantitatively analyze the influence of geomechanical boundary constraints and initial reservoir temperature on the evolutionary behavior of fracture aperture, fluid flow and heat transfer, and further identify the underlying mechanisms dominating the coupled THM processes. The results reveal that, apart from enhancing normal opening of fractures, the transient cooling effect of thermal front may trigger shear dilations under the anisotropic in-situ stress condition. It is found that the applied in-situ stress tends to impose a strong impact on the spatial and temporal variations of fracture apertures and flow rates, and eventually affect heat transfer. The enhancement of reservoir transmissivity during transient cooling tends to be significantly overestimated if the in-situ stress effect is not incorporated, which may lead to unrealistic predictions of heat extraction performance. Our study also provides physical insights into a fundamental thermo-poroelastic behavior of fractured rocks, where fracture aperture evolution during heat extraction tends to be simultaneously governed by two mechanisms: (1) thermal expansion-induced local aperture enlargement and (2) thermal propagation-induced remote aperture variation (can either increase or decrease). The results from our study have important implications for optimizing heat extraction efficiency and managing seismic hazards during fluid injections in geothermal reservoirs.

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Acknowledgements

Zhixue Sun is grateful for the funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 51774317), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant no. 18CX02100A) and the China Scholarship Council Fund. Xiaoguang Wang was funded by PRC-CNRS Joint Research Project from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 5181101856) and National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant no. 2020YFC1808300). Wen Zhou is grateful for research grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 42002157 and 41972137). The authors are grateful for the constructive comments from the editor and two anonymous reviewers, which helped to improve the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, 266000, China

    Zhixue Sun & Chuanyin Jiang

  2. College of Energy, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, 610051, China

    Xiaoguang Wang & Wen Zhou

  3. HSM, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS,IRD, Montpellier, France

    Xiaoguang Wang

  4. Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Qinghua Lei

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  1. Zhixue Sun
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  2. Chuanyin Jiang
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  3. Xiaoguang Wang
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  4. Wen Zhou
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  5. Qinghua Lei
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Correspondence to Xiaoguang Wang.

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Sun, Z., Jiang, C., Wang, X. et al. Combined Effects of Thermal Perturbation and In-situ Stress on Heat Transfer in Fractured Geothermal Reservoirs. Rock Mech Rock Eng 54, 2165–2181 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-021-02386-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-021-02386-2

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