Speaker
Description
Natural gas hydrates, abundant in ocean floor sediments and permafrost regions, represent a promising unconventional energy resource. Current production methods interfere with the thermodynamic equilibrium to stimulate hydrate dissociation, releasing methane and water while altering formation porosity and permeability. Accurately estimating relative permeability during dissociation is critical for assessing the economic viability of gas production from hydrate-bearing sediments. In this study, we developed a coupled multiphase reactive transport and thermal Lattice-Boltzmann (LB) method to rigorously model mass transfer, conjugate heat transfer, and multiphase flow during hydrate dissociation. The dissociation processes were simulated for the two predominant hydrate distribution morphologies—pore-filling and grain-coating—under thermal intervention from formation sensible heat. Our results demonstrate that the coupling of gas transport and heat transfer significantly influences pore geometry evolution, thereby impacting capillarity and the Jamin effect on multiphase transport and relative permeability. These findings highlight the necessity of incorporating these coupling effects into numerical simulations to achieve accurate relative permeability estimations in hydrate formations.
| Country | United States |
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