Characterization of Hydraulic Active Fractures in a Dolostone Aquifer Using Heat and Contaminants As Tracers

Abstract:

The number of hydraulically active fractures serving as advective contaminant migration pathways facilitating plume migration in fractured rock aquifers cannot be determined with confidence from indirect means such as visual inspection of core, borehole geophysics, and is only inferred from hydraulic tests. However, the position of depth-discrete hydraulic activity may be determined using contaminants or heat as tracers yet spatially detailed profile measurement techniques are required without imparting measurement bias of an open borehole. Contaminant concentration profiles from numerous samples along continuous core from a site contaminated since the early 1980’s and heat injection in the sealed boreholes with high resolution profile monitoring are used to characterize the fracture network .

Heat pulse tests using active distributed temperature sensing (DTS) were conducted in coreholes sealed with an impermeable flexible liner manufactured by FLUTe (Santa Fe, NM) to detect hydraulically active fracture zones. Using a Silixa ULTIMA-HS^TM DTS, temperature data was acquired every 12.6 cm along an optic fiber cable with a spatial resolution of 29 cm. Temperature precision is on the order of 0.02°C for averaged measurements collected over 5 minute intervals. The test consisted of heating the measurement cable for 4 hours and monitoring the cooling process for over 8 hours. The resulting dataset consists of high-resolution temperature profiles at five-minute time steps during the test period. Dolostone rock composes most of the lithology units of the corehole, therefore it is unlikely that there are significant variations in rock thermal diffusivity.

Multiple, successive temperature profiles were used to identify depth-discrete, hydraulically active flow zones with varying transmissivity based on different rates of heat dissipation. These variations were then compared with independent datasets including detected concentrations of contaminants in numerous rock core samples with depth, visual indication of staining on fracture surfaces in rock core logs, fracture size and intensity identified in the ATV log, and variability in borehole high hydraulic conductivity by continuous packer testing and T-profiling methods.