A coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical model for simulating leakoff-dominated hydraulic fracturing with application to geologic carbon storage

•An efficient and effective modeling scheme for thermo-hydro-mechanical processes in fluid-driven fracturing.•Self-stabilizing features of leak-off dominated regime alleviated numerical difficulties.•A high-fidelity tool to evaluate complex CO2 injection scenarios for marginal-permeability reservoir.•Revealed intriguing behaviors of reservoir-caprock-fluid system with fracturing induced by cold CO2 injection. A potential risk of injecting CO2 into storage reservoirs with marginal permeability (≲ 10 mD (1 mD = 10−15 m2)) is that commercial injection rates could induce fracturing of the reservoir and/or the caprock. Such fracturing is essentially fluid-driven fracturing in the leakoff-dominated regime. Recent studies suggested that fracturing, if contained within the lower portion of the caprock complex, could substantially improve the injectivity without compromising the overall seal integrity. Modeling this phenomenon entails complex coupled interactions among the fluids, the fracture, the reservoir, and the caprock. We develop a simple method to capture all these interplays in high fidelity by sequentially coupling a hydraulic fracturing module with a coupled thermal-hydrological-mechanical (THM) model for nonisothermal multiphase flow. The model was made numerically tractable by taking advantage of self-stabilizing features of leakoff-dominated fracturing. The model is validated against the PKN solution in the leakoff-dominated regime. Moreover, we employ the model to study thermo-poromechanical responses of a fluid-driven fracture in a field-scale carbon storage reservoir that is loosely based on the In Salah project's Krechba reservoir. The model reveals complex yet intriguing behaviors of the reservoir-caprock-fluid system with fracturing induced by cold CO2 injection. We also study the effects of the in situ stress contrast between the reservoir and caprock and thermal contraction on the vertical containment of the fracture. The proposed model proves effective in simulating practical problems on length and time scales relevant to geological carbon storage.