This research investigates gas hydrate formation and dissociation in samples from India's Krishna Godavari (KG) basin, a promising gas hydrate reservoir. Experiments with pure water and KG basin samples at varying water saturations (100%, 90%, and 80%) were conducted under field-like thermodynamic conditions using a non-stirred system. The Pressure-Temperature trace identified hydrate nucleation and dissociation points. Results showed that reducing water saturation from 100% to 80% decreased gas consumption from 5.64 to 4.67 liters and water-to-hydrate conversion from 27.29 ml to 22.60 ml. Lower water saturation increased soil content, inhibiting hydrate formation. This study highlights the need to further explore water saturation's impact on permeability and hydrate growth in geological media.
Enormous storage of hydrocarbon gases in the form of gas hydrates shall be the future energy resource for the world's energy need. Its high energy density, low carbon emission and huge resources added the advantage to be attracted globally (Klauda & Sandler, 2005). Natural Gas Hydrates (NGH) are ice-like crystalline solids made up of water and gas molecules. Water molecules entrap the gas molecules within the hydrogen-bound ice structures under high pressure and low temperature conditions (Gabitto & Tsouris, 2010). The favourable thermodynamic conditions are naturally occurring in the permafrost region (130-2000m depth) and deep-water sediments (800-3000m water depth) (Milkov & Sassen, 2000).Under favourable thermodynamic conditions 1m3 of NGH stores 164m3 methane gas and 0.87m3 water. Besides producing methane gas from NGH, storing and transporting huge amount of gases in the form of Gas hydrates is useful. Hence, insights into formation and dissociation kinetics of NGH are essential for exploitating of vast reserves of methane gas from the NGH reservoir. The study of the formation and dissociation of NGH also has other significant applications, such as storage and transport of natural gas, carbon-di-oxide capture and sequestration, flow assurance in oil and gas pipelines, hydrogen storage, etc [(Babu et al., 2013; Chari et al., 2013; Kumar et al., 2015; Veluswamy et al., 2014; Waite et al., 2002)].
