Modeling recovery of natural gas from hydrate reservoirs with carbon dioxide sequestration: Validation with Iġnik Sikumi field data

Fundamental understanding of guest gas replacement in hydrate reservoirs is crucial for the enhanced recovery of natural gas and carbon dioxide (CO(2)) sequestration. To gain physical insight into this exchange process, this work aims at developing and validating a clathrate hydrate model for gas replacement. Most of the practical concerns associated with naturally occurring gas hydrates, including hydrate formation and dissociation in interstitial pore space between distributed sand particles in the presence of salt ions and in irregular nanometer-sized pores of those particles, irregularity in size of particles and shape of their pores, interphase dynamics during hydrate formation and decay, and effect of surface tension, are addressed. An online parameter identification technique is devised for automatic tuning of model parameters in the field. This model is employed to predict the laboratory-scale data for methane hydrate formation and decomposition. Subsequently, the model is validated with the field data of the Prudhoe Bay Unit on the Alaska North Slope during 2011 and 2012. In this Iġnik Sikumi field experiment, mixed CO(2) (i.e., CO(2) + N(2)) is used as a replacement agent for natural gas recovery. It is observed that the proposed formulation secures a promising performance with a maximum absolute average relative deviation (AARD) of about 2.83% for CH(4), which is even lower, 0.84% for CO(2) and 1.67% for N(2).