Effect of natural fracture on the heat mining of enhanced geothermal system based on the thermo-hydro-mechanical coupling model

Hydraulic fracture, natural fracture and fracture networks play a vital role for heat mining of Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS). In this work, a two-dimensional thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) EGS model was proposed to investigate the effect of natural fracture on heat extraction performance. Based on the local thermal non-equilibrium theory and discrete natural fracture network, the spatial and temporal distribution of temperature, pore pressure, effective stress, rock matrix porosity and permeability are investigated. The results show that the natural fracture has a significant negative effect on the production temperature. After the 40-year prediction, the production temperature of the base model is 45.5°C lower than that of the without natural fracture model. In the initial operation stage, the low-temperature region is mainly distributed in the region of artificial fracture and injection well, then it expands significantly to the natural fracture due to the stress redistribution. The key parameters of quantity and orientation of natural fracture can lead to a decline in production temperature and earlier thermal breakthroughs within the thermal reservoir.