Methane hydrate formation using high gravity equipment: A new method for recovery of associated gas in offshore oilfields

Abstract

For deep-sea oil exploitation far away from land, there is inevitably the generation of oilfield-associated gas. It is a new method for recover oilfield associated gas by using a high-gravity device to generate hydrate. In this paper, the methane hydrate formation process of different packings in the high-gravity machine was studied. By comparing the structural morphology of varying packings and the characteristics of the hydrate in the high-gravity machine, a new type of layered packing is designed and manufactured. The volumetric storage capacity, normalized gas consumption rates and methane absorption time of foam metal packing, metal mesh packing, 3D printing spiral packing, and new layered packing were investigated experimentally. The results show that the new layered packing has significant advantages. The maximum volumetric storage capacity, normalized gas consumption rate, and the shortest methane absorption time are 239265 mol/(m³·min), and 74 min, respectively. It exhibits an excellent methane hydrate formation effect and the advantage of small equipment size. It is very suitable for the recovery of oilfield-associated gas produced in the process of offshore oil exploitation.

Keywords

Methane hydrate / High-gravity machine / Foam metal packing bed / Metal mesh packing bed / 3D printing spiral packing bed / New layered packing bed

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Qi Nie: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Jianlu Zhu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Liang Hao: Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Yuxing Li: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The High-tech ship research project of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China (CBG3N21-2-6); This project ZR2024ME050 supported by Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation.

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