Start
Sep 21, 2011 - 16:00
End
Sep 21, 2011 - 17:00
Venue
Creativity Hall (Room 118) Chemical Engineering
Event Type
Speaker
Jyoti Phirani University of Houston Houston
Title
Methane Production from Hydrate Bearing Sediments
Abstract: Large quantities of natural gas hydrates are present in marine sediments along the coastlines of many countries as well as arctic region. The production of gas from these naturally occurring gas hydrates is difficult due to complexity of thermodynamics and fluid flow involved in theprocess. This seminar will focus on assessing production of natural gas from methane gas hydrate deposits. An implicit multiphase multi-component thermal 3D simulator is used which can simulate formation and dissociation of hydrates in porous media in both equilibrium and kinetic modes. We have validated the simulator in the DOE code comparison study and with core scale formation and dissociation experiments of methane hydrates. We simulate depressurization and warm water flooding to find the gas production scenarios for confined unconfined and dipping reservoirs underlain by an aquifer layer. For confined reservoirs production rate increases with increasing injection pressure but depressurization alone is effective if production well pressure is low. For unconfined reservoirs depressurization is ineffective thermal stimulation is necessary for gas production. Depressurization alone is effective in dipping unconfined reservoirs but much slower than warm water injection. As the injection point of the warm water moves down the reservoir the start of the high gas recovery phase gets delayed but the time for completion of gas recovery becomes shorter.Biosketch of the speaker: Jyoti Phirani obtained her B. Tech in chemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2006. She then pursued PhD in chemical engineering from University of Houston (with Prof. Kishore Mohanty) on methane production from hydrate bearing sediments. She is currently working as a Reservoir Engineer with Occidental Oil and Gas Corp. in Houston and work on Permian Basin in West Texas.