Active Tracers for Hydraulic Control of Cooled Short Circuits: Bench-scale Demonstration and Forward Modeling

Commercially successful geothermal systems require balance between thermal and hydraulic
performance. An injector-producer well pair with exceptional hydraulic performance, for instance, may
have inadequate thermal performance if the effective heat transfer surface area is insufficient. In such a
circumstance the current state-of-the-art is to abandon such well pairs once production well
temperatures fall below design/operating criteria. Here, an "active" tracer is introduced as a novel
solution that enables cooled "short circuits" to be sealed off and circulating fluids to be redirected to
hotter flow paths. This treatment increases the effective heat transfer area and subsequently improves
thermal performance by increasing production well temperatures. Bench-scale laboratory experiments
are presented and the anticipated improvement to thermal performance is determined from a
hypothetical case.