ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Georeservoirs
Physicochemical kinetic reactive transport modeling in quartz arenite: Implications on geothermal potential
Provisionally accepted
- West Virginia University, Morgantown, United States
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Kinetic reactive transport modeling has been performed on the quartz-dominant Tuscarora Sandstone. Physical parameters including temperature, porosity, and permeability, as well as chemical parameters including pH, dissolved ions, and mineral precipitation and dissolution have been explored as a function of flow rate. This approach has shown strong spatial relationships between fluid-rock interactions and flow, particularly with respect to extensive reservoir cooling. At 10 L/s, the reservoir is cooled to ~75 oC after 50 years and is nearly entirely equilibrated with the working fluid at 30 L/s. There is a slight increase in porosity immediately near the injection well likely due to reservoir dissolution. Simulation results in the reservoir block model show negligible secondary mineral precipitation at all modeled injection rates. We suggest that the proposed model can be utilized in evaluating the geothermal potential of low porosity quartz arenite reservoirs by predicting spatial temperature variations as well as observed fluid-mineral assemblages in field settings.
Keywords: Geothermal reservoir engineering, matrix transport, reactive transport modeling, Secondary precipitation, Tuscarora sandstone
Received: 15 Sep 2025; Accepted: 11 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bowman, Barton, Pathak and Sharma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Samuel Bowman
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