Exploiting Hot Dry Rock (HDR) and gas resources from extremely low permeable, highly stressed reservoirs has great potential to help meet greenhouse gas reduction target in Australia. Among other countries, Australia has favourable geological features required to make HDR energy generation commercially viable. The prevailing reverse/strike slip fault stress regimes in the proven hot rock regions of the Australian continent provide a unique favourable condition for HDR geothermal energy

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... nt. However, the current stimulation techniques such as hydraulic stimulation and matrix acidisation practiced in the petroleum industry have been found inefficient for exploiting the potential 23 million petajoules of HDR resource that exists in Australia and the estimated 30 TCF of tight gas resource in central Australia. Therefore, an alternative stimulation technology called 'shear dilation' has been selected in the present work to investigate its effectiveness in exploiting these resources. The basic assumption for the proposed stimulation technology is the presence of interconnected natural fractures. These natural fractures are characterized by various parameters such as fracture size, orientation, density etc. The model developed to analyse this stimulation process has the capability to simulate a network of interconnected natural fractures using fracture data available from cores and logs. The simulated fracture network is then analyzed using pseudo-elastic mechanics approach to predict its hydraulic conductivity induced by stimulation pressure. In order to understand the basic mechanism of this technology and to derive numerical values of various input parameters for the numerical model, a series of laboratory tests has been carried out as part of this thesis work. The numerical model is then run for a number of cases to investigate the pattern of permeability enhancement and reservoir growth as a function of stimulation pressure. Sensitivities of various reservoir parameters, such as in-situ stresses and natural [...]