Methane Production From Hydrate Bearing Formations

Demand for natural gas is ever increasing and according to DOE, by 2040, 10 Tcf/yr of gas has to be imported. Interest in the potentially large deposits of natural gas hydrates and hydrate capped gas reservoirs is increasing because a conservative estimate of gas hydrate reserve potential of US exclusive economic zone is 200,000 Tcf. If 1% of this were recovered, that would be greater than the cumulative gas reserves of conventional gas sources (1000-1500 Tcf). Even 1% production of this recovered gas per year would make USA the exporter of gas. Currently, most of the work is based on the laboratory studies since an important part of developing commercial gas production technology is predicting the methane production rates for various field operating scenarios using models. The objective of the proposed work is to study the effect of various reservoir properties (water saturation, hydrate permeability, rock permeability, thickness of the reservoir, porosity) on the production of gas from a hydrate-bearing reservoir. A mathematical model was developed to study production concepts for natural gas hydrate accumulations.