Investigation into gas production from natural gas hydrate: A review

Natural gas hydrates (NGHs), which extensively exist in sea-floor and permafrost regions, are considered as an alternative energy in the future for the fossil fuels approaching depletion with the gradually increasing energy consumption. Because of the particularity of NGH stabilizing only in the conditions of the high pressure and the low temperature, the exploitation of NGH is distinguished from those of petroleum and natural gas. Researchers over the world are devoting themselves to developing the technologies of NGH exploitation. However, till now, few NGH exploitation technology is identified and employed to exploit commercially NGH. Although there do be two cases of short-term NGH exploitation in Mackenzie Delta (CAN), Alaska North Slope (USA) and Nankai Trough (JAP) in the past 10 years. It is mainly because some characteristics of the flow (gas, water, gas-hydrate slurry, quicksand, etc.), the issues of heat and mass transfer, the risk assessment and the economic evaluation are still not comprehensively recognized. Presently, the researches of NGH exploitation are mainly carried out from three aspects, numerical simulation and analysis, experimental simulation and field trial exploitation for the different technologies. In this paper, we comprehensively review the relevant studies of NGHs and propose our comments. We not only represent the achievements for the NGH exploitation researches, but also discuss the limitations and challenges, raise some questions and put forward some suggestions from our points of view.