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COMPREHENSIVE UTILIZATION OF GEOTHERMAL AND SOLAR ENERGY TO EXPLOIT GAS HYDRATES BURIED IN OCEANIC SEDIMENTS

University of British Columbia. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering; International Conference on Gas Hydrates (6th : 2008 : Vancouver, B.C.)

How to exploit and make use of natural gas hydrates in oceans will weigh much in the future researches. Unlike the oil or gas reservoirs, the distributions of natural gas hydrate are very complicated and don’t congregate massively in oceanic sediments. Besides, factors such as seafloor geohazards and climate must be taken into account, which makes it much more difficult and complicated to exploit oceanic gas hydrates than conventional oil or gas. Nowadays neither of such methods as thermal stimulation, depressurization, inhibitor injection, carbon dioxide replacement and mixing exploitation etc. is applied to exploit gas hydrates in marine sediments because of their disadvantages. This paper introduces a conception of combining solar and geothermal energy for gas hydrates exploitation. The model mainly includes five parts: solar energy transferring module, sea water circulating module, underground boiler module, platform and gas-liquid separating module. Solar cells and electric heaters are used to heat the formations containing hydrates. Because they become relatively more mature and cheaper, it’s the key of how to utilize the geothermy to exchange heat in developing this conception, which needs solution of fluid leakage, circulating passages and heat-exchange interface problems in building underground boiler. Probably it’s a feasible measure to use an effective hydraulic control system and hydraulic fracturing. The idea should be a good choice to exploit marine gas hydrates by combining solar and geothermal energy since this method has a great advantage either in terms of efficiency or cost.

Marine gas hydrates; Exploitation methods; Geothermal energy; Solar energy; Underground boiler

Text

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0040996

Non UBC

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/