A PCM-based active temperature-preserved coring method for deep sea natural gas hydrate

Abstract

Natural gas hydrate (NGH) has a bright future as a clean energy source with huge reserves. Coring is one of the most direct methods for NGH exploration and research. Preserving the in-situ properties of the core as much as possible during the coring process is crucial for the assessment of NGH resources. However, most existing NGH coring techniques cannot preserve the in-situ temperature of NGH, leading to distortion of the physical properties of the obtained core, which makes it difficult to effectively guide NGH exploration and development. To overcome this limitation, this study introduces an innovative active temperature-preserved coring method for NGH utilizing phase change materials (PCM). An active temperature-preserved corer (ATPC) is designed and developed, and an indoor experimental system is established to investigate the heat transfer during the coring process. Based on the experimental results under different environment temperatures, a heat transfer model for the entire ATPC coring process has been established. The indoor experimental results are consistent with the theoretical predictions of the heat transfer model, confirming its validity. This model has reconstructed the temperature changes of the NGH core during the coring process, demonstrating that compared to the traditional coring method with only passive temperature-preserved measures, ATPC can effectively reduce the core temperature by more than 5.25 °C. With ATPC, at environment temperatures of 15, 20, 25, and 30 °C, the duration of low-temperature state for the NGH core is 53.85, 32.87, 20.32, and 11.83 min, respectively. These findings provide new perspectives on temperature-preserving core sampling in NGH and provide technical support for exploration and development in NGH.

Keywords

Deep sea coring / Natural gas hydrate / Active temperature-preserved method / Phase change material

Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (Nos. JSGG20220831105002005 and KJZD20231025152759002), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 52274133 and 523B2101).

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