Reservoir Scale Simulation of Hydrate Dynamics

The purpose of this project has been to investigate hydrate phase transition mechanisms and to implement kinetic simulation results from advanced theoretical simulations (Density Functional Theory, Phase Field Theory) into a reservoir simulator. The imple mentation is through simplified models based on the observed kinetically limiting factors from the advanced kinetic and non-equilibrium simulations. The reservoir simulation platform is a reactive transport code named RetrasoCodeBright(RCB) which has been extended at University of Bergen to become a high pressure CO2 storage simulator. Unlike treatment of hydrate in other reservoir simulators, the different hydrate phase transitions are treated as pseudo reactions and as such, dynamically reflect locally competing phase transitions. The main goal has been to bring the model up to a level that enables studies of possible hydrate exploitation scenarios (pressure reduction, CO2 injection).