Investigation of thermal cooling effect of long-term circulation in Raft River enhanced geothermal system

Abstract

The Raft River Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) demonstration project incorporated three hydraulic stimulations in well RRG-9 ST1 to improve geothermal production. This study investigated the injectivity index (injection rate divided by injection pressure) increase during long-term injection into RRG-9-ST1 after the stimulations from the perspective of thermoelasticity. We have used a one-dimensional approximate solution to estimate the injectivity/aperture change due to thermal cooling. The inferred aperture change vs. square root of time falls along a linear trend. The thermal coefficient (a combination of rock thermal properties, rock initial temperature, and injected fluid temperature) back-calculated by fitting the field injection data is in the same order of magnitude as the value directly calculated from these parameters. We have conducted fully-coupled thermal-hydro-mechanical modeling to simulate long-term circulation (cold water injection). The simulated injectivity index increased by 1.7 × 10−8 m3/(Pa·s) after 272 days of cold-water injection, similar to the field data, which increased by 2.5 × 10−8 m3/(Pa·s). Both the trend and the magnitude of the simulated injectivity change match with the field data recorded at Raft River. The injectivity index increased faster at the beginning and then the rate of increase became smaller with time. The injectivity index increase is hypothesized to be the result of fracture aperture increase due to cooling effects. The simulated fracture aperture at the injection well increased by 0.64 mm, and the simulated maximum fracture aperture increased by 1.93 mm. The trend of the simulated aperture change also matches the value interpreted from the field data using the 1D approximate solutions. The study suggests that cooling is the major reason for the injectivity increase at Raft River EGS during the long-term injection. More broadly, cold water injection could serve as a method to increase the injectivity in other settings after high-volume and high rate/pressure hydraulic stimulation