Monetizing gas has now become a high priority issue for many countries. Natural gas is a much cleaner fuel than oil and coal especially for electricity generation. Approximately 40 percent of the world's natural gas reserves remain unusable because of lack of economic technology. Gas produced with oil poses a challenge of being transported and is typically flared or re-injected into the reservoir. These are gas transportation issues we now face.
Gas hydrate may be a viable means of capturing, storing and transporting stranded and associated gas. For example, stranded gas in Trinidad could be converted to gas hydrates and transported to the islands of the Caribbean. This study will seek to address some of the limitations from previous studies on transporting natural gas as a hydrate while focusing on small scale transportation of natural gas to the Caribbean Islands. This work proposes a workflow for capturing, storing and transporting gas in the hydrate form, particularly for Caribbean situations where there are infrastructural constraints such as lack of pipelines. The study shows the gas hydrate value chain for transportation of 5 MMscf/d of natural gas from Trinidad to Jamaica. The analysis evaluated the water required for hydrate formation, effect of composition on hydrate formation, the energy balance of the process, the time required for formation, transportation and dissociation and preliminary economics.
The overall energy requirement of the process which involves heating, cooling and expansion is about 15-20 percent of the energy of the gas transported in hydrate form. The time estimated for the overall process is 20–30 hrs. The estimated capital cost to capture and transport 5 MMscf/d from Trinidad to Jamaica is about US$ 30 million. The composition of the gas sample can affect the conditions of formation, heating value and the expansion process.
In summary, there is great potential for transporting natural gas by gas hydrate on a small scale based on the proposed hydrate work flow. This study did not prove commerciality at this time, however, some of the limitations require further evaluations and these include detailed modeling of the formation time, dissociation time and heat transfer capabilities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-12-8972 |
| Date | 2010 December 1900 |
| Creators | Rajnauth, Jerome Joel |
| Contributors | Barrufet, Maria, Flacone, Gioia |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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