Gas hydrate dynamics in distributed porous particles with saltwater: Model formulation and experimental validation

A potential source of energy is encapsulated in the form of natural gas hydrates found in the diverse permafrost and marine geological settings. To understand the hydrate dynamics, we articulate a rigorous mathematical formulation by contemplating the pervasive role of indigenous elements, including porous material and saline water of the natural gas hydrate reservoirs. This formulation takes into account the characteristic behavior of the porous media in the aspects of their porosity and particle size distribution, and the dynamic contribution of the saline water towards the hydrate formation and growth in reservoir mimicking environment. All relevant model parameters are tuned by using the generalized reduced gradient nonlinear optimization technique. The model is employed to investigate the dynamics of methane hydrate at diverse field conditions (e.g. porous medium with varying sizes of clay, sand and silt particles, amount of saline water, and operating pressure and temperature). Validating the model with experimental data for three different setups, its performance improvement is quantified in terms of the absolute average relative deviation (AARD). This proposed model shows a promising performance at the wide range of conditions.