Abstract
Depressurization method seems to be a cost-effective solution to liberate natural gas from methane hydrate-bearing layers. Depressurization decreases the system pressure to below the pressure of hydrate formation at a specific temperature. However the potential of producing gas from hydrate reservoirs has not been fully investigated. Therefore, a method of acquiring data from numerous dissociation experiments performed in a laboratory is necessary to assess the efficiency of the process and the decomposition characteristics. This research presents dissociation characteristics during depressurization. In our experiments, we used an artificial sedimentary core and performed several depressurization experiments under various depressurization rate and production pressure conditions. The temperature, pressure, and production volumes of gas and water were measured in response to time. As the results, production pressure affects gas recovery rate and production rate. Core sensible heat is rapidly consumed by dissociation and this heat is not supplied to dissociate all bearing methane hydrate.
