Deep geothermal: The ‘Moon Landing’ mission in the unconventional energy and minerals space

Journal of Earth Science - Tập 26 - Trang 2-10 - 2015
Klaus Regenauer-Lieb1,2,3, Andrew Bunger4, Hui Tong Chua1, Arcady Dyskin1, Florian Fusseis5, Oliver Gaede1,6, Rob Jeffrey2, Ali Karrech1, Thomas Kohl7, Jie Liu1,8, Vladimir Lyakhovsky9, Elena Pasternak1, Robert Podgorney10, Thomas Poulet2, Sheik Rahman3, Christoph Schrank1,6, Mike Trefry11, Manolis Veveakis2, Bisheng Wu2, David A. Yuen12, Florian Wellmann13, Xi Zhang2
1School of Petroleum Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
2Earth Science and Resource Engineering, CSIRO, Kensington, Australia
3School of Earth and Environment, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
4Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering & Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
5School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
6Science and Engineering Faculty, School of Earth, Environmental and Biological Sciences, Earth Systems, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
7Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, German
8School of Earth Science and Geological Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China
9Geological Survey of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel
10Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, USA
11Land and Water, CSIRO, Floreat Park, Australia
12Department of Earth Sciences and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
13Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science (AICES), RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Tóm tắt

Deep geothermal from the hot crystalline basement has remained an unsolved frontier for the geothermal industry for the past 30 years. This poses the challenge for developing a new unconventional geomechanics approach to stimulate such reservoirs. While a number of new unconventional brittle techniques are still available to improve stimulation on short time scales, the astonishing richness of failure modes of longer time scales in hot rocks has so far been overlooked. These failure modes represent a series of microscopic processes: brittle microfracturing prevails at low temperatures and fairly high deviatoric stresses, while upon increasing temperature and decreasing applied stress or longer time scales, the failure modes switch to transgranular and intergranular creep fractures. Accordingly, fluids play an active role and create their own pathways through facilitating shear localization by a process of time-dependent dissolution and precipitation creep, rather than being a passive constituent by simply following brittle fractures that are generated inside a shear zone caused by other localization mechanisms. We lay out a new theoretical approach for the design of new strategies to utilize, enhance and maintain the natural permeability in the deeper and hotter domain of geothermal reservoirs. The advantage of the approach is that, rather than engineering an entirely new EGS reservoir, we acknowledge a suite of creep-assisted geological processes that are driven by the current tectonic stress field. Such processes are particularly supported by higher temperatures potentially allowing in the future to target commercially viable combinations of temperatures and flow rates.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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Journal of Earth Science

Tập 26

2-10

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