Predicting the Hydrate Stability Zones of Natural Gases Using Artificial Neural Networks — A feed-forward artificial neural network with 19 input variables (temperature, gas hydrate structure, gas composition and inhibitor concentration in aqueous phase) and 35 neurons in single hidden layer has been developed for estimating hydrate dissociation pressures of natural gases in the presence/absenc...

Gas hydrates stored on continental shelves are susceptible to dissociation triggered by environmental changes. Knowledge of the timescales of gas hydrate dissociation and subsequent methane release are critical in understanding the impact of marine gas hydrates on the ocean-atmosphere system. Here we report a methane efflux chronology from five sites, at depths of 220-400 m, in the southwest Ba...

Extensive faulting is observed in sediments containing high concentrations of methane hydrate off the southeastern coast of the United States. Faults that break the sea floor show evidence of both extension and shortening; mud diapirs are also present. The zone of recent faulting apparently extends from the ocean floor down to the base of gas-hydrate stability. We infer that the faulting result...

Laboratory Hydrate Data is one of the three constituent modules comprising the XML based Gas Hydrate Markup Language (a.k.a. GHML) schema, the others being Field Hydrate data by Löwner et al. and Hydrate Modeling by Wang et al. This module describes the characteristics of natural and synthetic gas hydrates as they pertain to data acquired via analysis within a laboratory environment. Such data ...

A two-dimensional pore-network model based on invasion percolation is used to study the patterns obtained from the release of methane during the dissociation of methane hydrates (without including dissociation kinetics) caused by a sudden pressure reduction in the system below the hydrate equilibrium pressure. The concept of the critical gas saturation S(gc) (volume fraction of the gas phase at...

The heat transfer analysis of hydrate-bearing sediment involved phase changes is one of the key requirements of gas hydrate exploitation techniques. In this paper, experiments were conducted to examine the heat transfer performance during hydrate formation and dissociation by a thermal method using a 5L volume reactor. This study simulated porous media by using glass beads of uniform size. Sixt...

Gas hydrates are a vast energy resource with global distribution in the permafrost and in the oceans. Even if conservative estimates are considered and only a small fraction is recoverable, the sheer size of the resource is so large that it demands evaluation as a potential energy source. In this review paper, we discuss the distribution of natural gas hydrate accumulations, the status of the p...

The formation of gas hydrates is crucial to many technological applications including energy production, storage, desalination, and CO2 capture. Kinetic hydrate inhibitor (KHI) chemicals have been used industrially for over 25 years suppress in key industrial applications. However the mechanisms by which they operate, specifically whether delay nucleation or just retard growth, remain open ques...