Analyzing Permeability of the Irregular Porous Media Containing Methane Hydrate using Pore Network Model Combined with CT

Abstract

Gas hydrate as the 21st century new energy is viewed as prospective energy with clean, smaller pollution, and large storage characteristics. The permeability is a key parameter for gas hydrate production. In this work, pore network models combined with X-ray computed tomography (CT) were proposed to analyze the properties of gas hydrate in porous media. We studied the permeability in porous media, used the different shapes of sand including quartz, dolomite and feldspar. Experimental results show that in these three kinds of sand, the absolute permeability of quartz is the largest, feldspar is minimal. Under the same water saturation, capillary pressure of dolomite is less than quartz; water-phase relative permeability in porous media did not obvious change, while gas phase relative permeability is a big difference. Gas phase relative permeability of dolomite is smaller than the other two kinds of sand with low water saturation. However, under the high water saturation, gas phase relative permeability of dolomite is greater than the other two kinds of sand.