[1] During sea-level drop, water and gas pressures within oceanic hydrate systems can exceed the total vertical stress and this can drive slope failure and gas venting. We investigate this behavior with a multi-phase fluid and heat flow model. During sea-level drop, fluid pressures drop much less than the total stress due to both the high gas compressibility and hydrate dissociation. In permeab...

In order to investigate the mechanism of gas hydrate deposition and agglomeration in gas dominated flowlines, a high-pressure micromechanical force (MMF) apparatus was applied to directly measure CH4/C2H6 hydrate adhesion/cohesion forces under low temperature and high pressure conditions. A CH4/C2H6 gas mixture was used as the hydrate former. Adhesion forces between hydrate particles and carbon...

Physical property measurements of sediment cores containing natural gas hydrate are typically performed on material exposed at least briefly to non-in situ conditions during recovery. To examine effects of a brief excursion from the gas-hydrate stability field, as can occur when pressure cores are transferred to pressurized storage vessels, we measured physical properties on laboratory-formed s...

As part of an international cooperative research program, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and researchers from the National Gas Hydrate Program (NGHP) of India are studying the physical properties of sediment recovered during the NGHP-01 cruise conducted offshore India during 2006. Here we report on index property, acoustic velocity, and triaxial shear test results for samples recovered from ...

Vast quantities of methane are trapped in oceanic hydrate deposits, and there is concern that a rise in the ocean temperature will induce dissociation of these hydrate accumulations, potentially releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, such a release could have dramatic climatic consequences. The recent discovery of active methane gas ...

Adhesion (cohesion) and agglomeration properties of gas hydrate particles have been a key to hydrate management in flow assurance in natural gas pipelines. Despite its importance, the relevant data in the area, such as the surface energy and the interfacial energy of gas hydrates with gas and/or water, are scarce; presumably due to the experimental difficulties involved in the measurements. Her...

The accumulation of gas hydrates in marine sediments is essentially controlled by the accumulation of particulate organic carbon (POC) which is microbially converted into methane, the thickness of the gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ) where methane can be trapped, the sedimentation rate (SR) that controls the time that POC and the generated methane stays within the GHSZ, and the delivery of met...

Based on currently available data from site measurements and the preliminary estimates of the gas production potential from the hydrate accumulations at the SH7 site in the Shenhu Area using the depressurization method with a single horizontal well placed in the middle of the Hydrate-Bearing Layer (HBL), the dependence of production performance on the permeabilities of the overburden (OB) and u...

We present molecular dynamics simulation evidence of spontaneous formation of quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) hydrogen gas hydrates within single-walled carbon nanotubes (SW-CNTs) of nanometer-sized diameter (1-1.3 nm) near ambient temperature. Contrary to conventional 3D gas hydrates in which the guest molecules are typically contained in individual and isolated cages in the host lattice, the gues...

The kinetics of the initial stage of crystallization of one-component gas hydrates in aqueous solutions are analyzed. The temporal evolution of the volume of hydrate crystallized and the moles of gas consumed are determined. Expressions are derived for the supersaturation dependence of the hydrate crystallite growth rate and the induction time in hydrate crystallization. These expressions are u...