(108a) Monetising Gas Hydrates: New Mode for Natural Gas Storage and Transportation Against LNG Storage and Transportation

Gas Hydrates are considered in the petroleum industry e.g. natural gas transportation through pipelines, during natural gas production from the crude oil wells. But this paper focuses on converting the nuisance of gas hydrates to an attractive means of transportation. New Technology development has been focusing on using gas hydrates as a way of converting gas to solids.

            The Natural Gas Hydrate (NGH) is a clatherate compound in icy state and stabilised around -20 degree Celsius under atmosphere. This paper summarises about the cost effectiveness of the NGH value chain against the LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) value chain and also in this paper entire processes and operations to create NGH pellets are designed and discussed. The calculations show that this process has a high initial plant cost but on a long term this process of NGH production is cost effective compared to LNG liquefaction process. Moreover, it is easy to handle the NGH at -20 to -30 degree Celsius compared to LNG at around -160 degree Celsius.

            Thus, this unique method of transporting the natural gas in bulk solid form leads to reduction of the total investment cost for the entire value chain. Moreover, NGH is expected to be a plausible solution in monetising small to medium gas fields which are considered to be difficult to be developed economically using LNG.