Reinjection is crucial for sustainable geothermal developments. In order to predict thermal performances due to cold-water injection, a method was developed to estimate effective fracture surface areas (i.e., heat transfer areas). Tracer response curves at production wells are analyzed to determine flow rates and pore volumes, and the fracture surface areas are optimized by short-term thermal response curves. Because the method erases fracture apertures from the equation by combining mass and heat transfer equations, the fracture surfaces can be analyzed without assuming that the fracture shape is a parallel plate. The estimation method was applied to two geothermal field datasets: One involved an artificially created reservoir, and the other involved a naturally occurring reservoir. The estimated heat transfer areas are reasonable in the field geometries. Once the fracture surface area is estimated, the future temperature change and power generation can be predicted. This can provide a simple and quick method to design reinjection strategies.
Reinjection is crucial for sustainable geothermal developments. In order to predict thermal performances due to cold water injection, a method has been developed to estimate effective heat transfer areas. Tracer response curves at production wells are analyzed to determine flow rate and pore volume at each flow path, and effective heat transfer areas are optimized by short-term thermal response curves from the same production wells. This study accounted for water leakage from the flow path into surrounding rocks in the estimation method. The estimation method was validated by comparing with numerical simulation results. The estimation results show good accuracies of the effective heat transfer areas in the numerical simulation. This method was applied to data from the Balcova geothermal field. The estimated heat transfer areas were reasonable.
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