How much carbon dioxide can be stored in the structure H clathrate hydrates?: A molecular dynamics study

The stability of structure H (sH) carbon dioxide clathrate hydrates at three temperature-pressure conditions are determined by molecular dynamics simulations on a 3x3x3 sH unit cell replica. Simulations are performed at 100 K at ambient pressure, 273 K at 100 bars and also 300 K and 5.0 kbars. The small and medium cages of the sH unit cell are occupied by a single carbon dioxide guest and large cage guest occupancies of 1-5 are considered. Radial distribution functions are given for guests in the large cages and unit cell volumes and configurational energies are studied as a function of large cage CO2 occupancy. Free energy calculations are carried out to determine the stability of clathrates for large cage occupancies at three temperature/pressure conditions stated above. At the low temperature, large cage occupancy of 5 is the most stable while at the higher temperature, the occupancy of 3 is the most favored. Calculations are also performed to show that the CO2 sH clathrate is more stable than the methane clathrate analog. Implications on CO2 sequestration by clathrate formation are discussed. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.