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Investigation of a new HDR system with horizontal wells and multiple fractures using the coupled wellbore–reservoir simulator TOUGH2MP-WELL/EOS3

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Abstract

Geothermal energy is renewable, sustainable and available in large amounts. The hot dry rock (HDR) systems, in particular, have the largest potential for long-term sustainability and therefore draw a lot of attention. The combination of horizontal wells and the technology of multiple transverse fractures technology is an attractive approach of such HDRs, which is called in this paper as the specific EGS (enhanced geothermal system). The main objective of this paper is to study the heat extraction over a period of 20 years by water circulating in a deep geothermal reservoir using this specific EGS. The wellbore flow module, T2WELL/ECO2N, is implemented in the parallelized simulator TOUGH2MP as a new code TOUGH2MP-WELL/EOS3, which enables coupled wellbore–reservoir simulations. Using this newly developed code, the sensitivity of heat extraction against various parameters of the formation and fractures is assessed. The influences of the fracture geometry and the space of two neighborhood fractures on the geothermal energy performance are analyzed. According to the results in this paper, the injection rate, the wellbore radius and the fracture permeability are three main influence factors for the distribution of total flow through individual fractures. A large injection rate, a small wellbore radius and a large fracture width will cause the short-circuit effect, which reduces the performance of this specific EGS. Compared with the classic HDR system (doublet or triplet vertical wells + single fracture), this specific EGS has a much higher performance and a longer duration of the economic production. Furthermore, the horizontal wells can also be drilled in both directions of the minimum horizontal stress instead of in just one direction, so that the energy performance is doubled and the investment cost per kW energy production is decreased and the advantage of this specific EGS is significantly enlarged.

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Abbreviations

c :

Specific heat capacity [J/(kg K)]

F :

Mass flow rate (kg/s)

k :

Rock permeability (m2)

k(Δz l):

Permeability-thickness product (m3)

PI:

Productivity index (m3)

p well :

Fluid pressure in wellbore cell (Pa)

p rock :

Fluid pressure in the adjacent reservoir formation cell (Pa)

r e :

Grid block radius (m)

r w :

Wellbore radius (m)

s :

Skin factor (−)

T :

Temperature (°C)

w :

Fracture width (m)

α :

Correction factor for permeability-thickness product (−)

λ :

Thermal conductivity [W/(m K)]

μ :

Fluid viscosity (Pa s)

ρ :

Fluid density (kg/m3)

ϕ :

Porosity (−)

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Acknowledgments

The work presented in this paper was funded by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant 2012DFA60760), the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) (Grant 0325191E) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) (Grant 0325662F). We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Dr. Lehua Pan for his kindly support.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sino-German Energy Research Center, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

    Mengting Li, Yang Gou & Zhengmeng Hou

  2. Energy Research Center of lower Saxony, Clausthal University of Technology, Goslar, Germany

    Mengting Li, Yang Gou, Zhengmeng Hou & Patrick Were

  3. Institute of Petroleum Engineering, Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Zhengmeng Hou

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  1. Mengting Li
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Correspondence to Yang Gou.

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Li, M., Gou, Y., Hou, Z. et al. Investigation of a new HDR system with horizontal wells and multiple fractures using the coupled wellbore–reservoir simulator TOUGH2MP-WELL/EOS3. Environ Earth Sci 73, 6047–6058 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-4242-9

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