Open Collections

NUMERICAL STUDY ON PERMEABILITY HYSTERESIS DURING HYDRATE DISSOCIATION IN HOT WATER INJECTION

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

Hot water injection is a production technique proposed to gas recovery from methane hydrate reservoirs. However, from a practical point of view, the injected water experiences a drop in temperature and re-formation of hydrates may occur in the reservoir. In this work, we proposed a model expressing permeability hysteresis in the processes between hydrate growth and dissociation, and studied hydrate dissociation behavior during hot water injection. The model of permeability hysteresis was incorporated into the simulator MH21-HYDRES (MH21 Hydrate Reservoir Simulator), where the decrease in permeability with hydrate saturation during hydrate growth process was assumed to be much larger than the decrease during hydrate dissociation process. Laboratory hydrate dissociation experiments were carried out for comparison. In each experiment, we injected hot water at a constant rate into a sand-packed core bearing hydrates, and the histories of injection pressure, core temperature, and gas/water production rates were measured. Numerical simulations for the core experiments showed the re-formation of hydrates led to the increase in injection pressure during hot water injection. The simulated tendencies of pressure increase varied markedly by considering permeability hysteresis. Since the experimental pressure increases could not be reproduced without the permeability hysteresis model, the influence of permeability hysteresis should be considered to apply hot water injection to hydrate reservoirs.

Methane hydrate; Gas production; Hot water injection; Permeability hysteresis; Numerical simulation

Text

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0041118

Non UBC

Unreviewed

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