ABSTRACT

A series of empirical expressions for predicting gas hydrate stability, its volume fraction out of pore space and gas hydrate mass-density were established in different systems in consideration of gas composition (CH₄, C₂H₆, H₂S) and salinity (NaCl, seawater), and pore size at temperature between 273.15 and 300 K, based on our gas hydrate thermodynamic model (Sultan et al., 2004b, c). Six of the developed expressions for predicting gas hydrate stability were validated against the available published experimental data and they were also compared with other models. At temperature 273.15 to 290.15 K, the ARDPs (Average Relative Deviation of Pressures between the prediction and the experimental data) have shown that these empirical expressions are in agreement with the experimental data as well as other models, indicating their reliability of predicting gas hydrate stability for these systems. At higher temperatures, the empirical predictions for gas hydrate stability do not well reproduce the experimental data, because they are based on van der Waals model. The empirical expressions for predicting gas hydrate stability in the systems of CH₄ + H₂S + H₂O, CH₄ + seawater + poresize, CH₄ + H₂S + NaCl and CH₄ + CO₂ + NaCl, and for evaluating gas hydrate fraction and its density need further validation due to lack of available published experimental data. However, the empirical expressions for gas hydrate fraction and its density show that the effects of pore size and salinity are negligible; gas hydrate fraction will increase if methane concentration continuously increases relatively in excess of methane solubility and decreases with pressure within gas hydrate stability zone, which is well consistent with data of natural gas hydrates in Cascadia; gas hydrate density tends to increase with ethane percentage and decrease with pressure.