Thermally Assisted Dissociation of Methane Hydrates and the Impact of CO2 Injection

Abstract

The largest amount of methane gas is trapped in less-conventional natural gas resources, such as methane hydrates. It is estimated that these reserves of methane gas, in the form of hydrates, are larger than all of the conventional resources of methane gas combined. [U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), IndependentStatistics and Analysis, Potential of Gas Hydrates Is Great, but Practical Development Is Far off, http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=8690]. Methane extraction from hydrates can be coupled with carbon dioxide sequestration to make this process carbon-neutral. A large-scale laboratory reactor is used to simulate the conditions existing in permafrost hydrate sediments to study the hydrate formation and dissociation processes. The dissociation process occurs via a cartridge heat source (to simulate the down-hole combustion) and carbon dioxide injection, to study the CO2 sequestration behavior. The hydrate sediment studied was formed with 50% saturation of hydrate by pore volume...