1. Introduction
Hundreds of geothermal wells have been drilled in the Pannonian Basin, Hungary, in recent decades for direct-use applications of geothermal heat, with more than 900 active wells producing ~10.7 PJ of heat in 2019, the main uses being for balneology (~34%), agriculture (~27%), and district heating (~21%) [
1]. This extensive geothermal development reflects the high typical heat flow (~100 mW m
−2) and geothermal gradient (~45 °C km
−1) [
2] caused by the crustal thinning that accompanied lithospheric extension in the Early-Middle Miocene [
3,
4]. A key geothermal aquifer target in the Pannonian Basin is the sequence of deltaic and turbiditic sandstones deposited during the Pannonian stage of the Late Miocene (e.g., [
5,
6]). These rocks were emplaced at a time of dramatic environmental change, resulting in rapidly-changing sedimentary environments: the ancestral southward drainage of the Pannonian Basin to the Aegean Sea became disrupted, creating an endoreic lacustrine environment, before the modern drainage to the Black Sea via the River Danube became established [
7,
8,
9]. Infill of the Pannonian Basin ranged from lacustrine turbidites of the Szolnok Fm. and the Algyö Fm., deltaic sandstones of the Újfalu Fm. (formerly known as the Törtel Fm. [
10]), and fluvial sandstones of the Zagyva Fm., which form both prolific hydrocarbon reservoirs and also geothermal resources [
10,
11,
12,
13]. Strictly speaking, these named ‘formations’ are lithofacies associations with diachronous boundaries [
14], hence the ‘interleaved’ boundaries in
Figure 1.
Our study was initiated as part of an attempt to understand the low injectivity at the Mezőberény geothermal project site in SE Hungary, located in the Békés Basin, one of the deep sub-basins of the wider Pannonian Basin (
Figure 1). Given the delta plain depositional environment of the Újfalu Fm., this formation consists of a mix of sandstone, representing deposition within former channels, and siltstone/mudstone, representing overbank deposition (e.g., [
16,
17]). The lack of continuity of these sand bodies in any particular direction (for example, in the direction between the two wells at Mezőberény in
Figure 1A) potentially has a clear adverse effect on reservoir properties [
18].
Despite the long experience of production of geothermal heat and hydrocarbons from these sandstones, many geothermal sites experience reinjection issues; as a result, less than 10% of all Hungarian geothermal wells have been used as reinjection wells in the past decades (e.g., [
5,
6]). Chemical factors, such as scaling and clay mobilization, have previously been discussed as causes of these injection problems (e.g., [
19]), but effective mitigation has not been developed. These injection issues have significant adverse financial impact on projects by limiting production rates and causing high workover costs, even forcing closure of some projects. A major hurdle for solving these problems has been the limited availability of published information on these issues and the reservoir properties in general. Subsurface data from geothermal sites is limited because these are typically managed and designed by small companies and municipalities, which cannot afford investment in subsurface data collection, as is standard for oil and gas companies and crucial for optimization of well planning and operations. In May 2021 the Mining and Geological Survey of Hungary (Magyar Bányászati és Földtani SZolgálat; MBFSZ) launched their web portal providing access to geological data, including subsurface data [
20,
21]. However, this does not address the issue of site-specific data, relevant to the present study, being unavailable. One of few recently published studies, by Varga et al. [
22], on reservoir properties of Pannonian sandstone, provides a qualitative evaluation of scaling and cementation for a geothermal site at Szeged (
Figure 1). In contrast, one of the most recent publications to quantify porosity and permeability of Pannonian sandstones dates from 1994 [
11]. Istan Almási’s Ph.D. thesis, examined in 2001 [
23], which reports analyses of 12,899 core samples from 689 petroleum wells in Hungary, is widely cited as a source of information on hydraulic properties of geothermal reservoir rocks. However, this thesis did not present any original experimental data, it is essentially a compilation of pre-existing data from diverse sources (e.g., [
24,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29]), most of which are inaccessible. This thesis, which is available online [
23], reports summaries of results, the data compilation being provided only on a CD-ROM, which was unavailable to us; this dataset, held by MOL, remains confidential. Furthermore, this thesis presents aggregated results for the various sandstone facies present, there being no differentiation between the Szolnok Fm. (turbiditic), Újfalu Fm. (deltaic), and Zagyva Fm. (fluvial); as
Figure 1 indicates, core samples from circa 2 km depth might be from any of these subdivisions. Nonetheless, Almási [
23] reported that for reservoir sandstones from ~2 km depth the horizontal permeability is typically ~50% larger than the vertical permeability, both values being typically in the range ~100–200 mD; the porosity of these rocks is typically ~0.22 [
23].
A major reason for the lack of recent quantitative studies of reservoir properties is that much of the core data was recovered decades ago and the amount of high-quality material that remains in the public domain is relatively limited. Furthermore, coring had low recovery because of the unconsolidated nature of many Pannonian sandstone formations. At the start of this study in 2018, we consulted MBFSZ and MOL Plc. (Magyar OLaj- és Gázipari Részvénytársaság, Hungarian Oil and Gas Public Limited Company), who maintain in Szolnok a core repository for petroleum wells in the Pannonian Basin. Access to core in the Újfalu Fm. from wells in the Békés Basin (
Figure 1) was requested. Many core samples were available from the Újfalu Fm. elsewhere in Hungary and/or from other formations in the Békés Basin. However, for the Újfalu Fm. in the Békés Basin, the few core samples of sandstone that were collected, and were large enough for conventional laboratory experiments (i.e., plugging and flow experiments) to measure porosity and permeability, appear to have been processed long ago, the left-over fragments from wells in this area that were available to us from the MOL core repository being too small to be analyzed in this way.
This paper aims to begin filling this data gap on reservoir properties. We explore methods to extract porosity and permeability data from core material that is unsuitable for laboratory flow experiments. We obtained core for the Újfalu Fm. from the legacy Kond-1 and Gyoma-1 petroleum wells in the Békés Basin (
Figure 1). These fragments are analyzed using thin section analysis, Mercury Intrusion Porosimetry (MIP), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), X-ray Computed Tomography (X-CT) imaging, and numerical flow simulations. The thin section analysis and XRD provide information on mineralogy, for the assessment of scaling and reservoir erosion risks. MIP, X-CT imaging, and numerical flow experiments provide new porosity and permeability data. We then compare the permeability values from these experiments with estimates from production tests from two geothermal wells at Mezőberény, also in the Békés Basin (
Figure 1). These wells were drilled in 2012 to depths of ~2000 m and target the Újfalu Fm. [
15,
18]. With this approach we not only provide new data but also highlight the need for more reservoir characterization of Pannonian Sandstones. This is crucial for future efforts to avoid and solve injection problems and optimize exploitation of the enormous geothermal resource in this region. This paper is structured as follows: in section two our dataset is presented and the production tests and associated permeability estimates are discussed. In section three we describe the experimental methods in more detail, with section four presenting our results. The validity and applicability of our work are then discussed.
2. Data
Our subsurface dataset from the Békés Basin consists of Gamma-Ray (GR) logs of both Mezőberény geothermal wells (
Figure 2a), along with production logs and permeability from pressure build-up testing in both wells, as well as other data provided by the municipality of Mezőberény. The production logs will be used to estimate the permeability of each sandstone layer in the production intervals of both wells. In addition, three core fragments from the Újfalu Fm. were retrieved from the MOL Plc. core repository: two from the Gyoma-1 well (F3 and F4); one (F1) from the Kond-1 well (
Figure 1). GR logs of both these wells are shown in
Figure 2b. As is illustrated, both these wells have several cored intervals, typically of ~5 m vertical extent. Core recovery from these wells was very low because of the poor consolidation of the Újfalu Fm, only un-slabbed slices of the cored intervals being available. From the available fragments in the repository, the most sandstone-rich pieces were selected (
Figure 3).
During production logging in well VS-1, the total production rate (Q
t) was kept constant at 460 L/min. The log in
Figure 2a shows the contributions to the production flow from individual sandstone sections. Twelve production screens have been placed in the production interval of this well, connected by a blind production liner. The log shows that only the ten sandstone layers with lowest GR log readings contribute to the production flow, with individual contribution ranging from 10 to 140 L/min, the combined thickness of all producing layers being 43.3 m. In well T-1 four production screens are installed, of which only three intervals of combined thickness 12.5 m contributed to the production flow. The total production flow was 350 L/min during production logging of this well, the contributions of the three productive layers ranging from 100 to 130 L/min.
Table 1 summarizes these production logging outcomes. The percentage of flow that each layer contributes to the total is presented in the column with header F
i. In addition to production logging, gas-lift production tests were performed with pressure build-up measurements after shut-in periods of ~2 h. This time was too short to determine the skin factor, and only allows rough estimation of the average permeability K
a across the total production interval in each well: 89 mD in well VS-1 and 196 mD in well T-1. Utilizing these values, we estimated the permeability of each production layer assuming a modified version of the standard Theis [
30] steady state radial flow equation. Thus:
where Q
i is the flow rate from layer i, and F
i is the fraction of the total flow rate (Q
t) from that layer, and:
where K
i and h
i are the permeability and thickness of layer i, and h
t is combined thickness of all the producing layers (
Table 1).