DOE DE-FG26-00NT-40916 YEARLY PROGRESS REPORT TITLE: Fundamentals of Natural Gas and Species Flows from Hydrate Dissociation -Applications to Safety and Sea Floor Instability TITLE: Fundamentals of Natural Gas and Species Flows from Hydrate Dissociation -

• Main Author: Goodarz Ahmadi
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Methane hydrate
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1076.1274

DOE Project Officer: Dr. Thomas Mroz Main Accomplishments Production of natural gas from methane hydrate by a constant down-hole pressure well is studied in details. The completed report is described in this report. Progress was made in the numerical simulation of axisymmetric hydrate reservoirs using a computer simulation model. A new computational model for dissociation of hydrate in a core is initiated. The new model uses a user defined subroutine for the FLUENT Code for the analysis. 2 PRODUCTION OF NATURAL GAS FROM METHANE HYDRATE BY A CONSTANT DOWN-HOLE PRESSURE WELL ABSTRACT Natural gas production from the dissociation of methane hydrate in a confined reservoir by a depressurizing down-hole well was studied. The case that the well pressure was kept constant was treated and two different linearization schemes in an axisymmetric configuration were used in the analysis. For different fixed well pressures and reservoir temperatures, approximate self-similar solutions were obtained. Distributions of temperature, pressure and gas velocity field across the reservoir were evaluated. The distance of the decomposition front from the well and the natural gas production rate as functions of time were also computed. Time evolutions of the resulting profiles were presented in graphical forms and their differences with the constant well output results were studied. It was shown that the gas production rate was a sensitive function of well pressure and reservoir temperature. The sensitivity of the results to the linearization scheme used was also studied.