Widespread adoption of geothermal energy will require access to deeply buried resources in granitic basement rocks at high temperatures and pressures. Exploiting these resources necessitates novel methods for drilling, stimulation, and maintenance, under operating conditions that are often difficult or impossible to reproduce in laboratory settings. Physically rigorous numerical modeling tools are vital to highlight potential risks, guide process optimization and reduce the uncertainties involved in developing new technologies for these environments. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed, and is constantly improving, several multi-physics solid/structural mechanics, fluid dynamics, chemistry, and discrete element codes. Integration of the LLNL simulation tools into a coherent simulation environment will provide a predictive capability for the thermomechanical response - in particular the spall and fracture - of basement rocks at high temperatures and pressures useful for drilling and other geothermal applications. This paper outlines a modeling effort investigating the processes involved in hydrothermal spallation drilling. These include interconnected phenomena on several length and time scales: from system-scale fluid dynamics and heat transfer of the high temperature jet to the rock face to the grain-scale thermomechanics of spallation. Three models are described to capture these different scale processes: a grain-scale model to investigate the onset of spallation; a particulate fluids model to simulate the transport of the produced spalls; and a borehole-scale model to represent the integrated system behavior.

The primary objective of our current research is to develop a computational test bed for evaluating borehole techniques to enhance fluid flow and heat transfer in enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). Simulating processes resulting in hydraulic fracturing and/or the remobilization of existing fractures, especially the interaction between propagating fractures and existing fractures, represents a critical goal of our project. This paper details the basic methodology of our approach. Two numerical examples showing the capability and effectiveness of our simulator are also presented.

This paper describes the applications of the fractured continuum model to the different enhanced geothermal systems reservoir conditions. The capability of the fractured continuum model to generate fracture characteristics expected in enhanced geothermal systems reservoir environments are demonstrated for single and multiple sets of fractures. Fracture characteristics are defined by fracture strike, dip, spacing, and aperture. This paper demonstrates how the fractured continuum model can be extended to represent continuous fractured features, such as long fractures, and the conditions in which the fracture density varies within the different depth intervals. Simulations of heat transport using different fracture settings were compared with regard to their heat extraction effectiveness. The best heat extraction was obtained in the case when fractures were horizontal. A conventional heat extraction scheme with vertical wells was compared to an alternative scheme with horizontal wells. The heat extraction with the horizontal wells was significantly better than with the vertical wells when the injector was at the bottom.

Low permeability geothermal reservoirs can be stimulated by hydraulic fracturing to create Enhanced (or Engineered) Geothermal Systems (EGS) with higher permeability and improved heat transfer to increase heat production. In this paper, we document our effort to develop a numerical simulator with explicit geomechanics-discrete flow network coupling by utilizing and further advancing the simulation capabilities of the Livermore Distinct Element Code (LDEC). The important modules of the simulator include an explicit finite element solid solver, a finite volume method flow solver, a joint model using the combined FEM-DEM capability of LDEC, and an adaptive remeshing module. The numerical implementation is verified against the classical KGD model. The interaction between two fractures with simple geometry and the stimulation of a relatively complex existing fracture network under different in-situ stress conditions are studied with the simulator.