Title:

Optimization of Geothermal Well Stimulation Design Using a Geomechanical Reservoir Simulator

Authors:

Keita Yoshioka, Bulent Izgec and and Riza Pasikki

Key Words:

thermal fracturing, fracture modeling, treatment design

Conference:

Stanford Geothermal Workshop

Year:

2008

Session:

Production Engineering

Language:

English

Paper Number:

Yoshioka

File Size:

672KB

View File:

Abstract:

Conventional geothermal applications are limited to those with sufficient temperature, thermal gradient, and permeability. If these applications could be expanded to those with low or zero permeability, tremendous energy resources would suddenly be available. Thermal fracturing techniques are being looked at as potential methods of commercializing these types of reservoirs.

One drawback of using thermal fracturing techniques is the complexity of the rock/fluid interactions and the difficulty in modeling them to get reasonable treatment designs. A major challenge involves modeling both conductive and convective heat transfer in a matrix, and the stresses impacted by the heat transfer and the fluid leak-off (pore pressure effect on stress). Since these effects are all inter-woven, they have to be coupled in order to get appropriate fluid injection rates, pumping times, and injection fluid temperature in a reservoir with uncertain properties (permeability, composition, and mechanical properties).

This paper shows treatment designs resulting from a recently developed GeoMechanical Reservoir Simulator (GMRS®*), which predicts heat and mass transfer, thermo-hydro-mechanical fracture opening and dilatancy, and productivity or injectivity enhancement. We also demonstrate that injector well performance can be evaluated real-time by a reformulated Hall integral and its derivative for a geothermal reservoir. GMRS


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