Study of hydrate formation in gas-emulsion multiphase flow systems

Abstract

As the oil & gas industry moves into deep water, hydrate has been a major hazard to the deep sea flow assurance. The objective of this work is to study the hydrate formation kinetics in a gas-emulsion multiphase flow system. A series of experiments were carried out with different gas/liquid flow rates using a high pressure flow loop. Results showed that the experimental data were remarkably reproducible in the flow loop system. It was found that as the gas flow rate and liquid flow rate increased, the hydrate formation induction time increased and the critical supercooling degree decreased. The gas/liquid flow rates exhibited little effect on the hydrate formation amount. As the liquid hold-up increased, both the induction time and the critical supercooling degree increased at first and then decreased. In addition, the hydrate formation amount remained almost constant when the liquid hold-up was higher than 20%.