Experimental Investigation of Natural Gas Components During Gas Hydrate Formation in Presence or Absence of the L-Tyrosine as a Kinetic Inhibitor in a Flow Mini-loop Apparatus

Abstract

Hydrates are crystalline compounds similar to ice, with guest molecules like methane and ethane trapped inside cavities or cages formed by the hydrogen bounded framework of water molecules. These solid compounds give rise to problems in the natural gas oil industry because they can plug pipelines and process equipments. Low dosage hydrate inhibitors are a recently developed hydrate control technology, which can be more cost-effective than traditional practices such as methanol and glycols. The main objective of the present work is to experimentally investigate simple gas hydrate formation with or without the presence of kinetic inhibitors in a flow mini-loop apparatus. For this purpose, a laboratory flow mini-loop apparatus was set up to measure the induction time and gas consumption rate during gas hydrate formation when a hydrate forming substance such as methane, ethane, propane, carbon dioxide and iso- butane is contacted with water in the absence or presence of dissolved inhibitor at various concentration under suitable temperature and pressure conditions. In each experiment, a water blend saturated with pure gas is circulated up to a required pressure. Pressure is maintained at a constant value during experimental runs by means of the required gas make-up. The effect of pressure on gas consumption during hydrate formation is investigated with or without the presence of PVP (polyvinylpyrrolidone) and L-tyrosine as kinetic inhibitors at various concentrations. The experimental results show that increasing the pressure of the system, causes to increase the experimental gas consumption and decrease the induction time. Also, the extent of gas hydrate formation at a given time is clearly less in the presence of the inhibitors. Moreover, when comparing the gas consumption during the hydrate formation for simple gas hydrate formation in presence of PVP and L-tyrosine inhibitors, it is seen that the gas consumption in presence of L-tyrosine is lower than that of PVP for all experiments.