New Simulator for Non-Equilibrium Modeling of Hydrate Reservoirs

Abstract:

Due to Gibbs phase rule and combination of first and second law of thermodynamics, hydrate in nature cannot be in equilibrium since they come from different parent phases. In this system hydrate formation and dissociation is affected by local variables such as pressure, temperature and composition with mass and energy transport restrictions.

Available simulators have attempted to model hydrate phase transition as an equilibrium reaction. Although those which treated the processes of formation and dissociation as kinetics used model of Kim and Bishnoi based on laboratory PVT experiment, and consequently hard to accept up scaling to real reservoirs condition. Additionally, they merely check equilibrium in terms of pressure and temperature projections and disregard thermodynamic requirements for equilibrium especially along axes of concentrations in phases.

Non-equilibrium analysis of hydrate involves putting aside all the phase transitions which are not possible and use kinetic evaluation to measure phase transitions progress in each grid block for each time step. This procedure is Similar to geochemical reservoir simulators logic. As a result RetrasoCodeBright has been chosen as hydrate reservoir simulator and our work involves extension of this code. RetrasoCodeBright (RCB) is able to handle competing processes of formation and dissociation of hydrates as pseudo reactions at each node and each time step according to the temperature, pressure and concentration. Hydrates can therefore be implemented into the structure as pseudo minerals, with appropriate kinetic models.

In order to implement competing nature of phase transition kinetics of hydrate formation, we use classical nucleation theory based on Kvamme et al. as a simplified model inside RCB and use advanced theories to fit parameters for the model (PFT). Hydrate formation and dissociation can directly be observed through porosity changes in the specific areas of the porous media.

In this work which is in progress, we are going to inject CO₂ gas inside the methane-hydrate reservoir and consider different competing reactions which might happen.