Gas production from marine gas hydrate reservoirs using geothermal-assisted depressurization method
Md Nahin Mahmood, Boyun Guo
Abstract
Natural gas production from marine gas hydrate reservoirs has become attractive to the oil and gas industry in recent years. It is still a great challenge to recover natural gas from hydrate reservoirs efficiently mainly due to sand production and wellbore collapse problems associated with the production scheme of depressurization. The thermal recovery method has not been proven economical due to the high cost of energy consumption. This study focuses on using geothermal energy to assist the depressurization process so that well pressure drawdown can be reduced and thus sand production and wellbore collapse problems can be mitigated. The authors investigated the transfer of heat energy from a natural geothermal zone to a marine gas hydrate reservoir and its effect on gas well productivity using analytical models. The result of our investigation shows that the initial well productivity can be significantly improved using geothermal energy more than 10-fold. This work provides engineers with an analytical tool for the feasibility analysis of using geothermal energy to improve well performance in gas hydrate reservoirs. Cited as: Mahmood, M. N., Guo, B. Gas production from marine gas hydrate reservoirs using geothermal-assisted depressurization method. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2023, 7(2): 90-98. https://doi.org/10.46690/ager.2023.02.03