The evolution of flow pattern along a single fracture and its effects on heat production is a fundamental problem in the assessments of engineered geothermal systems (EGS). The channelized flow pattern associated with ubiquitous heterogeneity in fracture aperture distribution causes non-uniform temperature decrease in the rock body, which makes the flow increasingly concentrated into some preferential paths through the action of thermal stress. This mechanism may cause rapid heat production deterioration of EGS reservoirs. In this study, we investigated the effects of aperture heterogeneity on flow pattern evolution in a single fracture in a low-permeability crystalline formation. We developed a numerical model on the platform of GEOS to simulate the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical processes in a penny-shaped fracture accessed via an injection well and a production well. We find that aperture heterogeneity generally exacerbates flow channeling and reservoir performance generally decreases with longer correlation length of aperture field. The expected production life is highly variable (5 years to beyond 30 years) when the aperture correlation length is longer than 1/5 of the well distance, whereas a heterogeneous fracture behaves similar to a homogeneous one when the correlation length is much shorter than the well distance. Besides, the mean production life decreases with greater aperture standard deviation only when the correlation length is relatively long. Although flow channeling is inevitable, initial aperture fields and well locations that enable tortuous preferential paths tend to prolong heat production lives.

A corrigendum was submitted to the journal of Geothermics on our article "Environmentally friendly, rheoreversible, hydraulic-fracturing fluids for enhanced geothermal systems" Shao et al Geothermics 58 (2015) 22-31. In the original article some permeability values were underestimated, in particular, for rock samples fractured by the stimuli-responsive fracking fluid (PAA-CO2). In addition, effective pressures were determined to be lower for three control experiments (deionized water-carbon dioxide, DIW-CO2). Therefore, we revised values of permeability and effective pressure as well as performed additional lab-scale stimulation experiments under identical conditions to further verify/update the deductions presented in the discussion section. This is the reason for the additional data introduced in the below Table 1 (grey color). The authors regret the following inadvertent errors and corresponding modifications. These modifications do not change the scientific conclusions of the article.