Permeability evolution of fluid-injection-reactivated granite fractures of contrasting roughnesses

Abstract

Fracture/fault instability induced by fluid injection in deep geothermal reservoirs could not only vary the reservoir permeability but also trigger hazardous seismicity. To address this, we conducted triaxial shear experiments on granite fractures with different architected roughnesses reactivated under fluid injection, to investigate the controls on permeability evolution linked to reactivation. Our results indicate that the fracture roughness and injection strategies are two main factors affecting permeability evolution. For fractures with different roughnesses, a rougher fracture leads to a lower peak reactivated permeability (k_max), and varying the fluid injection strategy (including the confining pressure and injection rate) has a less impact on k_max, indicating that the evolution of permeability during fluid pressurization is likely to be determined by the fracture roughness along the shear direction. Both the fracture roughness and injection strategies affect the average rates of permeability change and this parameter also reflects the long-term reservoir recovery. Our results have important implications for understanding the permeability evolution and the injection-induced fracture/fault slips in granite reservoirs during the deep geothermal energy extraction.

Keywords

Granite fractures / Fluid injection / Fracture roughness / Permeability evolution / Triaxial shear

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Fengshou Zhang: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing. Guanpeng He: Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft. Mengke An: Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing - original draft. Rui Huang: Data curation, Writing - review & editing. Derek Elsworth: Data curation, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42077247 and 42107163), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. Derek Elsworth acknowledges support from the G. Albert Shoemaker endowment. We appreciate the assistance of Junjie Wei and Congqiang Xu in contributing to the experiments.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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