A Review of Clathrate Hydrate Nucleation

Clathrate hydrates are crucial from the point of view of flow assurance and future energy resources, as well as potential innovative and sustainable applications such as gas separation, CO2 sequestration, district and data center cooling, seawater desalination, and natural gas storage. Although proof of concept has been demonstrated, significant progress is necessary in order to achieve industrial-level validation and commercialization. Most of the applications possess a common requirement of enhanced kinetics in formation and dissociation. There is a need for a broader understanding of hydrate nucleation mechanisms, cause-effect relations, and investigation techniques. The stochastic nature of hydrate nucleation, confounding cause-effect relations, and spatial-temporal scales have made it even more challenging to study nucleation. The use of hydrate promoters, novel reactor configurations such as porous media in a packed bed, and nanoparticles and hydrogels necessitates us to obtain further insights about clathrate nucleation. This review provides an in depth analysis about the characteristics of clathrate hydrate nucleation and the techniques adopted for studying nucleation from an application-oriented perspective and enables further development of clathrate technology toward future applications.