Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical-Chemical Simulation of Methane Hydrate Dissociation in Porous Media

The vast amount of methane deposits in permafrost and oceanic sediments has significant energy and environmental implications. There are increasing interests in the development of numerical simulation techniques to predict the reservoir responses due to natural gas recovery from methane hydrate dissociation. There has been extensive amount of work on modeling the chemo- thermo- hydro-responses associated with hydrate dissociation. The mechanical responses of hydrate bearing ground, however, have largely been overlooked and are just starting to receive more and more attention. From energy recovery perspective, a comprehensive model that includes the mechanical responses of hydrate disassociation is crucial for predicting the mechanical stability of gas hydrate reservoir and potential geohazards. This paper proposes a thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical model for simulating the dissociation of methane hydrate. The governing equations for the conservation of energy (thermal), mass (hydraulic) and momentum (mechanical) were derived from the local balance equations. The proposed governing equation system for methane hydrate as a four-phase four-component composite was simplified based on reasonable assumptions to facilitate numerical implementations. The dissociation reaction was considered using chemical kinetics. Auxiliary relationships such as the soil water characteristic curve, constitutive correlations, stress formulation based on the mixture theory were employed to mathematically close the formulation. The mathematical model was implemented using the finite element method. The simulation results were evaluated and compared with those obtained by conventional simulators based on thermo-hydro-chemical models. The mechanical module of this new model was applied to predict the geotechnical responses induced by gas recovery in a typical oceanic reservoir.