The injection-production performance of an enhanced geothermal system considering fracture network complexity and thermo-hydro-mechanical coupling in numerical simulations

Abstract The effect of fracture networks on EGS performance remains worth further investigation to guide the formulation of geothermal extraction strategy. We established models that account for thermo-hydraulic-mechanical (THM) coupling and that are based on the framework of discrete fracture network (DFN) to evaluate the heat extraction performance in deep-seated fractured reservoir. Our numerical results reveal that the zones of temperature, pressure, and stress perturbation diffuse asynchronously during the circulation of injection-production, and the stress perturbation always lags behind the other two. Furthermore, the effects of the fracture network characteristics including randomness, geometry, length, aperture, and injection parameters on the heat production are quantitatively investigated. Under the same number of fractures, different network geometry leads to different EGS production performance, the network with horizontal fracture set shows better thermal extraction performance but poor injection performance, which is because the fracture dip affects the thermal evolution on the horizontal plane. The effect of fracture length on EGS performance highly depends on its orientation, the excessive increase of fracture length towards injection-production wells is detrimental to heat extraction. The fracture aperture affects the working fluid transport and thus the EGS performance, the fractured reservoir with smaller fracture aperture shows the worse fluid flow performance but the better geothermal extraction performance, thus we believe that the optimal fracture aperture should be kept at a level of 0.5–1.0 mm in a self-propping fractured granitic system. The main influence of injection parameters on thermal extraction from the fractured reservoirs is the injection mass rate, because a high injection rate results in significant solid responses, including failure stress concentration, decreased safety factor, and increased permeability, which occur in those fractures that are originally connected to the injection well. These results of our research and the insights obtained have important implications for deep geothermal geoengineering activities