Achieving effective and simultaneous consolidation breaking and sand removal in solid fluidization development of natural gas hydrate

Natural gas hydrate (NGH) as the new generation clean energy resource possesses tremendous commercial potential and strategic significance. Solid fluidization is one of the major extraction approaches and shows advantages in reducing safety risks as the reservoir pressure is maintained at native condition. Despite of great promises in this technology, one critical challenge embedded within the extraction process is the deep separation of NGH particles from their weakly consolidated sands. Solving this practical issue requires comprehensive understanding of the interactions between NGH fragments and sands yet seldom systematic studies were available. Herein, we proposed to achieve simultaneous NGH-sand consolidation breaking and sand removal by hydro-cyclone technology. We firstly launched a systematic theoretical analysis on the mechanical forces of NGH fragments within the swirling flow field, and then validated the principle of our method on polyproylene-quartz sand research template. We constructed a dual-chamber cyclone desander (DCCD) apparatus and the results showed polypropylene recovery efficiency was as high as 99.8%. Collectively, our solid fluidization technology pioneers the development of safe NGH extraction by killing consolidation breaking and separation these two birds with one stone.