Clathrate Hydrates Of Natural Gases Third Edition

Striking a balance between theoretical and experimental perspectives, this book presents a historical overview of clathrate hydrates and examines future trends, reviews crystal structures and properties, reveals industrial applications of clathrate hydrates in the production and processing of natural gas, discusses hydrate kinetics and elucidates the current status of hydrate time dependence, analyzes time-independent phase equilibria, and more. With nearly 300 tables and illustrations, the book is a practical guide for chemical, design, process, petroleum, and mechanical engineers; chemists and geochemists; geologists; geophysicists; and graduate-level students in these disciplines.

Hydrate research has expanded substantially over the past decade, resulting in more than 4,000 hydrate-related publications. Collating this vast amount of information into one source, Clathrate Hydrates of Natural Gases, Third Edition presents a thoroughly updated, authoritative, and comprehensive description of all major aspects of natural gas cla

Rarely covered in formal engineering courses, natural gas hydrates are a common problem and real-life danger for engineers worldwide. Updated and more practical than ever, Natural Gas Hydrates, Third Edition helps managers and engineers get up to speed on all the most common hydrate types, how to forecast when they will appear, and safely mitigate their removal. Known for being highly flammable, gas hydrates are a preventable threat that can costs millions of dollars in damage, as well as take the lives of workers and engineers on the rig. The third edition of Natural Gas Hydrates is enhanced with today’s more complex yet practical utilization needs including: New hydrate types and formers, including mercaptans and other sulfur compounds Vital information on how to handle hydrate formation in the wellbore, useful information in light of the Macondo explosion and resulting oil spill More detailed phase diagrams, such as ternary systems, as well as more relevant multicomponent mixtures Quantifiably measure the conditions that make hydrates possible and mitigate the right equipment correctly Predict and examine the conditions at which hydrates form with simple and complex calculation exercises Gain knowledge and review lessons learned from new real-world case studies and examples, covering capital costs, dehydration, and new computer methods

This book had its genesis in a symposium on gas hydrates presented at the 2003 Spring National Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The symposium consisted of twenty papers presented in four sessions over two days. Additional guest authors were invited to provide continuity and cover topics not addressed during the symposium. Gas hydrates are a unique class of chemical compounds where molecules of one compound (the guest material) are enclosed, without bonding chemically, within an open solid lattice composed of another compound (the host material). These types of configurations are known as clathrates. The guest molecules, u- ally gases, are of an appropriate size such that they fit within the cage formed by the host material. Commonexamples of gas hydrates are carbon dioxide/water and methane/water clathrates. At standard pressure and temperature, methane hydrate contains by volume 180 times as much methane as hydrate. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has estimated that there is more organic carbon c- tained as methane hydrate than all other forms of fossil fuels combined. In fact, methane hydrates could provide a clean source of energy for several centuries. Clathrate compounds were first discovered in the early 1800s when Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday were experimenting with chlorine-water mixtures.

“Natural Gas Hydrates: Experimental Techniques and Their Applications” attempts to broadly integrate the most recent knowledge in the fields of hydrate experimental techniques in the laboratory. The book examines various experimental techniques in order to provide useful parameters for gas hydrate exploration and exploitation. It provides experimental techniques for gas hydrates, including the detection techniques, the thermo-physical properties, permeability and mechanical properties, geochemical abnormalities, stability and dissociation kinetics, exploitation conditions, as well as modern measurement technologies etc. This book will be of interest to experimental scientists who engage in gas hydrate experiments in the laboratory, and is also intended as a reference work for students concerned with gas hydrate research. Yuguang Ye is a distinguished professor of Experimental Geology at Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology, China Geological Survey, China. Professor Changling Liu works at the Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology, China Geological Survey, China.

This book is a companion to “Natural Gas Hydrate in Oceanic and Permafrost Environments” (Max, 2000, 2003), which is the first book on gas hydrate in this series. Although other gases can naturally form clathrate hydrates (referred to after as ‘hydrate’), we are concerned here only with hydrocarbon gases that form hydrates. The most important of these natural gases is methane. Whereas the first book is a general introduction to the subject of natural gas hydrate, this book focuses on the geology and geochemical controls of gas hydrate development and on gas extraction from naturally occurring hydrocarbon hydrates. This is the first broad treatment of gas hydrate as a natural resource within an economic geological framework. This book is written mainly to stand alone for brevity and to minimize duplication. Information in Max (2000; 2003) should also be consulted for completeness. Hydrate is a type of clathrate (Sloan, 1998) that is formed from a cage structure of water molecules in which gas molecules occupying void sites within the cages stabilize the structure through van der Waals or hydrogen bonding.

Natural gas hydrates can affect the transportation of oil and gas through pipelines. They can also affect the atmosphere through the greenhouse effect, and may serve as a natural resource for methane gas, for example. All of these aspects of gas hydrates are explored, along with possible solutions, in this volume.