Permeability enhancement by CO2 injection and chelating agent stimulation for creating geothermal reservoirs in granite

Existing research indicates that to create geothermal reservoirs using CO2 injection, additional stimulation methods are necessary. N, N-bis(carboxymethyl)-L-glutamic acid (GLDA) injection has been predicted to increase the permeability of CO2 injection-induced cloud-fracture networks (CFNs) and could serve as an additional stimulation method. Nevertheless, the influence of differential stress, flow geometry, and scale on the charac-teristics of permeability enhancement by GLDA injection is yet to be clarified. Accordingly, this study experi-mentally elucidated the permeability enhancement characteristics of injecting a chelating agent in fractured granite under differential stress conditions as an additional method for creating geothermal reservoirs using CO2 injection. GLDA injection experiments were conducted on fractured-granite samples under conventional-and true-triaxial stress states under varying differential stress and pH conditions. Regardless of the differential stress and pH conditions, rock deformation and acoustic emission (AE) were negligible during the chelating agent flow-through experiments on the fractured samples, whereas similar permeability enhancement factors were achieved within the same duration. Thus, stress did not affect the permeability enhancement by chelating agent injections. The permeability enhancement factors were inferred to be high near the injection borehole because of the high viscosity of the solution. Therefore, reservoir stimulation should be conducted using low-concentration chelating agent solutions at constant injection pressures. The study provides insights into the stimulation strategies for creating geothermal reservoirs using CO2 injection.