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

Klaus Regenauer-Lieb; Andrew Bunger; Hui Tong Chua; Arcady Dyskin; Florian Fusseis; Oliver Gaede; Rob Jeffrey; Ali Karrech; Thomas Kohl; Jie Liu; Vladimir Lyakhovsky; Elena Pasternak; Robert Podgorney; Thomas Poulet; Sheik Rahman; Christoph Schrank; Mike Trefry; Manolis Veveakis; Bisheng Wu; David A. Yuen; Florian Wellmann; Xi Zhang

doi:10.1007/s12583-015-0515-1

Journal of Earth Science ›› 2015, Vol. 26 ›› Issue (1) : 2 -10. DOI: 10.1007/s12583-015-0515-1

Special Issue on Geohtermal Energy

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

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¹ School of Petroleum Engineering, University of New South Wales, 2052, Sydney, NSW, Australia

² Earth Science and Resource Engineering, CSIRO, 6151, Kensington, WA, Australia

³ School of Earth and Environment, The University of Western Australia, 6000, Perth, WA, Australia

⁴ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering & Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

⁵ School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

⁶ Science and Engineering Faculty, School of Earth, Environmental and Biological Sciences, Earth Systems, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

⁷ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, German

⁸ School of Earth Science and Geological Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, 510275, Guangzhou, China

⁹ Geological Survey of Israel, 95501, Jerusalem, Israel

¹⁰ Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, USA

¹¹ School of Environmental Studies, China University of Geosciences, 430074, Wuhan, China

¹² Land and Water, CSIRO, 6014, Floreat Park, WA, Australia

¹³ Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science (AICES), RWTH Aachen University, 52062, Aachen, Germany

¹⁴ Department of Earth Sciences and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, University of Minnesota, 55455, Minneapolis, MN, USA

^a klaus@unsw.edu.au

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Abstract

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.

Keywords

geothermal energy / enhanced geothermal systems / fracture mechanics / creep / dissolution / precipitation

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Klaus Regenauer-Lieb, Andrew Bunger, Hui Tong Chua, Arcady Dyskin, Florian Fusseis, Oliver Gaede, Rob Jeffrey, Ali Karrech, Thomas Kohl, Jie Liu, Vladimir Lyakhovsky, Elena Pasternak, Robert Podgorney, Thomas Poulet, Sheik Rahman, Christoph Schrank, Mike Trefry, Manolis Veveakis, Bisheng Wu, David A. Yuen, Florian Wellmann, Xi Zhang. Deep geothermal: The ‘Moon Landing’ mission in the unconventional energy and minerals space. Journal of Earth Science, 2015, 26(1): 2-10 DOI:10.1007/s12583-015-0515-1

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