Developing meshing workflows in Gmsh v4.11 for the geologic uncertainty assessment of high-temperature aquifer thermal energy storage

Abstract

Evaluating uncertainties of geological features on fluid temperature and pressure changes in a reservoir plays a crucial role in the safe and sustainable operation of high-temperature aquifer thermal energy storage (HT-ATES). This study introduces a new automated surface fitting function in the Python API (application programming interface) of Gmsh (v4.11) to simulate the impacts of structural barriers and variations of the reservoir geometries on thermohydraulic behaviour in heat storage applications. These structural features cannot always be detected by geophysical exploration but can be present due to geological complexities. A Python workflow is developed to implement an automated mesh generation routine for various geological scenarios. This way, complex geological models and their inherent uncertainties are transferred into reservoir simulations. The developed meshing workflow is applied to two case studies: (1) Greater Geneva Basin with the Upper Jurassic (“Malm”) limestone reservoir and (2) the 5° eastward-tilted DeepStor sandstone reservoir in the Upper Rhine Graben with a uniform thickness of 10 m. In the Greater Geneva Basin example, the top and bottom surfaces of the reservoir are randomly varied by ± 10 and ± 15 m, generating a total variation of up to 25 % from the initially assumed 100 m reservoir thickness. The injected heat plume in this limestone reservoir is independent of the reservoir geometry variation, indicating the limited propagation of the induced thermal signal. In the DeepStor reservoir, a vertical sub-seismic fault juxtaposing the permeable sandstone layers against low permeable clay-marl units is added to the base case model. The fault is located in distances varying from 4 to 118 m to the well to quantify the possible thermohydraulic response within the model. The variation in the distance between the fault and the well resulted in an insignificant change in the thermal recovery (∼ 1.5 %) but up to a ∼ 10.0 % pressure increase for the (shortest) distance of 4 m from the injection well. Modelling the pressure and temperature distribution in the 5° tilted reservoir, with a well placed in the centre of the model, reveals that heat tends to accumulate in the updip direction, while pressure increases in the downdip direction.