Experimental Investigation of Methane Hydrate Formation in the Carboxmethylcellulose (CMC) Aqueous Solution

Abstract

Summary In the development of deepwater crude oil, gas, and gas hydrates, hydrate formation during drilling operations becomes a crucial problem for flow assurance and wellbore pressure management. To study the characteristics of methane hydrate formation in the drilling fluid, the experiments of the methane hydrate formation in water with carboxmethylcellulose (CMC) additive are performed in a horizontal flow loop under flow velocity from 1.32 to 1.60 m/s and CMC concentration from 0.2 to 0.5 wt%. The flow pattern is observed as bubbly flow in experiments. The experiments indicate that the increase of CMC concentration impedes the hydrate formation while the increase of liquid velocity enhances formation rates. In the stirred reactor, the hydrate formation rate generally decreases as the subcooling condition decreases. However, in this work, with the subcooling condition continuously decreasing, hydrate formation rate follows a “U” shaped trend—initially decreasing, then leveling out and finally increasing. It is because the hydrate formation rate in this work is influenced by multiple factors, such as hydrate shell formation, fracturing, sloughing, and bubble breaking up, which has more complicated mass transfer procedure than that in the stirred reactor. A semiempirical model that is based on the mass transfer mechanism is developed for current experimental conditions, and can be used to predict the formation rates of gas hydrates in the non-Newtonian fluid by replacing corresponding correlations. The rheological experiments are performed to obtain the rheological model of the CMC aqueous solution for the proposed model. The overall hydrate formation coefficient in the proposed model is correlated with experimental data. The hydrate formation model is verified and the predicted quantity of gas hydrates has a discrepancy less than 10%.