Impact of permeability heterogeneity on geothermal battery energy storage
Abstract view|1371|times PDF download|256|times
Abstract
In the emergence of new technologies to harness renewable energy, industrial-scale storage of heated water in a geothermal system is a promising technique. A porous, permeable medium, bounded by a poorly thermally conductive/convective overburden and underburden, can be used for transient subsurface thermal storage. The reservoir in this concept forms a geothermal battery. As a very simplified scenario, consider a single well injecting and producing hot water diurnally or seasonally. The source of the hot water could be solar-heated water, for example, or possibly even water heated from the excess regional electricity supply. For that situation, this study investigates the influence of spatial permeability heterogeneity on heat recovery, and the distributions of temperature and pressure inside the reservoir. Four heterogeneous models are created from lognormal distributions of permeability by varying the standard deviations while keeping the mean absolute permeability at 100 mD. The injection pressure experienced while pumping into a candidate formation is affected by heterogeneity; higher bottom hole pressure is required to inject water into a more heterogeneous reservoir. The spatial distribution of temperature is less affected by permeability heterogeneity. In the simulations carried out, 91% of the heat is recovered after the 30th cycle of injection/production operation in all cases proving less impact of heterogeneity on heat recovery for fixed injection and production rates.
Cited as: Panja, P., McLennan, J., Green, S. Impact of permeability heterogeneity on geothermal battery energy storage. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2021, 5(2): 127-138, doi: 10.46690/ager.2021.02.03
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ahmed, T. Reservoir Engineering Handbook. Amsterdam, Netherlands, Gulf Professional Publishing, 2010.
Aragón-Aguilar, A., Izquierdo-Montalvo, G., López-Blanco, S., et al. Analysis of heterogeneous characteristics in a geothermal area with low permeability and high temperature. Geoscience Frontiers, 2017, 8(5): 1039-1050.
Ashley, W. J., Panja, P., Deo, M. Surrogate models for production performance from heterogeneous shales. Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, 2017, 159: 244-256.
Assadoor, A. Y., Fawakhiri, A. Y., Taresh, S. H., et al. Problems encountered in simulating large heterogeneous reservoirs. Paper SPE 17940 Presented at the Middle East Oil Show, Bahrain, 11-14 March, 1989.
CMGL. Computer Modeling Group Ltd. Crooijmans, R. A., Willems, C. J. L., Nick, H. M., et al. The influence of facies heterogeneity on the doublet performance in low-enthalpy geothermal sedimentary reservoirs. Geothermics, 2016, 64: 209-219.
Dake, L. P. Fundamentals of Reservoir Engineering. Amsterdam, Netherlands, Elsevier, 1983.
Ehlig-Economides, C. A., Laine, R. E., Oguntaee, B. Effect of areal heterogeneity on waterflood performance between parallel horizontal wells. Paper SPE 90346 Presented at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Houston, Texas, 26-29 September, 2004.
Esposito, A., Augustine, C. The influence of reservoir heterogeneity on geothermal fluid and methane recovery from a geopressured geothermal reservoir. Paper SPE 53921 Presented at Thirty-Seventh Workshop on Geothermal Reservoir Engineering, Stanford, California, 30 January-1 February, 2012.
Green, S., McLennan, J., Panja, P., et al. Geothermal battery energy storage. Renewable Energy, 2021, 164: 777-790.
Gupta, A. D., Pope, G. A., Sepehrnoori, K., et al. Effects of reservoir heterogeneity on chemically enhanced oil recovery. SPE Reservoir Engineering, 1988, 3(2): 479-488.
Hopkinson, J. L., Natanson, S. G., Temple, A. P. Effects of reservoir heterogeneity on performance. Paper SPE 1581 Presented at the Fall Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME, Denver, Colorado, 2-5 October, 1960.
Ijeje, J. J., Gan, Q., Cai, J. Influence of permeability anisotropy on heat transfer and permeability evolution in geothermal reservoir. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2019, 3(1): 43-51.
Kusanagi, H., Watanabe, N., Shimazu, T., et al. Permeability-porosity relation and preferential flow in heterogeneous vuggy carbonates. Paper SPWLA JFES 2015E Presented at the SPWLA 21st Formation Evaluation Symposium of Japan, Chiba, Japan, 13-14 October, 2015.
Li, F., Xu, T., Li, S., et al. Assessment of energy production in the deep carbonate geothermal reservoir by wellbore-reservoir integrated fluid and heat transport modeling. Geofluids, 2019, 2019: 8573182.
Li, K., Xie, R. Effect of heterogeneity on production performance in low permeability reservoirs. Paper SPE 143482 Presented at the SPE EUROPEC/EAGE Annual Conference and Exhibition, Vienna, Austria, 23-26 May, 2011.
Naderi, M., Rostami, B., Khosravi, M. Effect of heterogeneity on the productivity of vertical, deviated and horizontal wells in water drive gas reservoirs. Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering, 2015, 23: 481-491.
Newley, T. M. J., Begg, S. H. Characterizing the effects of heterogeneity on oil recovery by dry gas injection. Paper SPE 24921 Presented at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Washington, D.C., 4-7 October, 1992.
Pandey, S. N., Chaudhuri, A., Rajaram, H., et al. Fracture transmissivity evolution due to silica dissolution/precipitation during geothermal heat extraction. Geothermics, 2015, 57: 111-126.
Panja, P., McLennan, J., Green, S. Temperature and pressure profiles for geothermal battery energy storage in sedimentary basins. Paper ARMA 2020 1411 Presented at the 54th U.S. Rock Mechanics/Geomechanics Symposium, physical event cancelled, 28 June-1 July, 2020.
Panja, P., McLennan, J., Green, S. Influence of permeability anisotropy and layering on geothermal battery energy storage. Geothermics, 2021, 90: 101998.
Vargas-Guzmán, J. A. Unbiased estimation of intrinsic permeability with cumulants beyond the lognormal assumption. SPE Journal, 2009, 14(4): 805-810.
Wang, C., Huang, Z., Lu, Y., et al. Influences of reservoir heterogeneity and anisotropy on CO2 sequestration and heat extraction for CO2 -based enhanced geothermal system. Journal of Thermal Science, 2019, 28(2): 319-325.
Wendt, D., Huang, H., Zhu, G., et al. Geologic thermal energy storage of solar heat to provide a source of dispatchable renewable power and seasonal energy storage capacity. Paper Presented at the Geothermal Resources Council (GRC) Annual Meeting and Expo, Palm Springs, California, 15-18 September 2019.
Wendt, D. S., Huang, H., Zhu, G., et al. Flexible geothermal power generation utilizing geologic thermal energy storage: Final seedling project report. Idaho National Laboratory, United States, 2019b. Xu, T., Zhu, H., Feng, G., et al. On fluid and thermal dynamics in a heterogeneous CO2 plume geothermal reservoir. Geofluids, 2017, 2017: 9692517.
Yang, G., Butler, R. M. Effects of reservoir heterogeneities on heavy oil recovery by steam-assisted gravity drainage. Journal of Canadian Petroleum Technology, 1992, 31(8): 37-43.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.46690/10.46690/ager.2021.02.03
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2021 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.