LBNL-50257 NUMERICAL STUDIES OF GAS PRODUCTION FROM SEVERAL CH 4-HYDRATE ZONES AT THE MALLIK

The Mallik site represents an onshore permafrost-associated gas hydrate accumulation in the Mackenzie Delta, Northwest Territories, Canada. A gas hydrate research well was drilled at the site in 1998. The objective of this study is the analysis of various gas production scenarios from several gas-hy...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: George J. Moridis, Timothy S. Collett, Scott R. Dallimore, Tohru Satoh, Steven Hancock, Brian Weatherill
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2002
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.151.2586
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/oil-gas/publications/Hydrates/pdf/text.50257.pdf
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Summary:The Mallik site represents an onshore permafrost-associated gas hydrate accumulation in the Mackenzie Delta, Northwest Territories, Canada. A gas hydrate research well was drilled at the site in 1998. The objective of this study is the analysis of various gas production scenarios from several gas-hydrate-bearing zones at the Mallik site. The TOUGH2 general-purpose simulator with the EOSHYDR2 module were used for the analysis. EOSHYDR2 is designed to model the non-isothermal CH4 release, phase behavior and flow under conditions typical of methanehydrate deposits by solving the coupled equations of mass and heat balance, and can describe any combination of gas hydrate dissociation mechanisms. Numerical simulations indicated that significant gas hydrate production at the Mallik site was possible by drawing down the pressure on a thin free-gas zone at the base of the hydrate stability field. Gas hydrate zones with underlying aquifers yielded significant gas production entirely from dissociated gas hydrate, but large amounts of produced water. Lithologically isolated gas-hydrate-bearing reservoirs with no underlying free gas or water zones, and gas-hydrate saturations of at least 50 % were also studied.