Abstract
The main challenge in extracting geothermal energy is to overcome issues relating to geothermal reservoirs such as the formation damage and formation fracturing. The objective of this study is to develop an integrated framework that considers the geochemical and geomechanics aspects of a reservoir and characterizes various formation damages such as impairment of formation porosity and permeability, hydraulic fracturing, lowering of formation breakdown pressure, and the associated heat recovery. In this research study, various shallow, deep and high temperature geothermal reservoirs with different formation water compositions were simulated to predict the severity/challenges during water injection in hot geothermal reservoirs. The developed model solves various geochemical reactions and processes that take place during water injection in geothermal reservoirs. The results obtained were then used to investigate the geomechanics aspect of cold-water injection. Our findings presented that the formation temperature, injected water temperature, the concentration of sulfate in the injected water, and its dilution have a noticeable impact on rock dissolution and precipitation. In addition, anhydrite precipitation has a controlling effect on permeability impairment in the investigated case study. It was observed that the dilution of water could decrease formation of scale while the injection of sulfate rich water could intensify scale precipitation. Thus, the reservoir permeability could decrease to a critical level, where the production of hot water reduces and the generation of geothermal energy no longer remains economical. It evident that injection of incompatible water would decrease the formation porosity. Thus, the geomechanics investigation was performed to determine the effect of porosity decrease. It was found that for the 50% porosity reduction case, the initial formation breakdown pressure reduced from 2588 psi to 2586 psi, and for the 75% porosity reduction case it decreased to 2584 psi. Thus, geochemical based formation damage is significant but geomechanics based formation fracturing is insignificant in the selected case study. We propose that water composition should be designed to minimize damage and that high water injection pressures in shallow reservoirs should be avoided.
Highlights
To reduce the global warming and limiting the temperature rising above 1.5 ◦C, an 80% reduction in energy emission by 2030 and 100% by 2050 are required [1]
The model ran for 6 pore volumes (PVs) and it was tuned
A detail analysis is performed to investigate the effect of water composition on formation porosity, permeability and related heat recovery during geothermal activities
Summary
To reduce the global warming and limiting the temperature rising above 1.5 ◦C, an 80% reduction in energy emission by 2030 and 100% by 2050 are required [1] This could only be achieved by the increased use of renewable energy. According to Yazici [4] lower temperature geothermal resources could be utilized for the generation of electricity by using the binary systems, which are described later. It is reported by Stelling et al [5] that around three-quarters of geothermal power plants are found in the vicinity of subduction zone (volcanoes). To generate electricity from geothermal reservoirs, three main technologies are utilized [2,3,4,5,6]:
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