Assessment of Energy Production in the Deep Carbonate Geothermal Reservoir by Wellbore-Reservoir Integrated Fluid and Heat Transport Modeling

Abstract

Geothermal energy is clean and independent to the weather and seasonal changes. In China, the huge demanding of clean energy requires the geothermal energy exploitation in the reservoir with depth larger than 1000 m. Before the exploitation, it is necessary to estimate the potential geothermal energy production from deep reservoirs by numerical modeling, which provides an efficient tool for testing alternative scenarios of exploitation. We here numerically assess the energy production in a liquid-dominated middle-temperature geothermal reservoir in the city of Tianjin, China, where the heat and fluid transport in the heterogeneous reservoir and deep wellbores are calculated. It is concluded that the optimal injection/production rate of the typical geothermal doublet well system is 450 m3/h, with the distance between geothermal doublet wells of 850 m. The outflow temperature and heat extraction rate can reach 112°C and 43.5 MW, respectively. Through decreasing injection/production rate lower than 450 m3/h and optimizing layout of the injection well and production well (avoiding the high permeability zone at the interwell sector), the risk of heat breakthrough can be reduced. If the low permeability zone in the reservoir is around injection well, it usually leads to abnormal high wellhead pressure, which may be solved by stimulation technique to realize stable operation. The methodology employed in this paper can be a reference for a double-well exploitation project with similar conditions.