(114b) Avoiding Gas Hydrate Problems via Environmentally Friendly Gas Hydrate Inhibitors

One of the biggest problem in processing oil and natural gas resources is the often occurring blockage in the pipelines caused due to uncontrolled gas hydrate formation in the pipelines. Dehydration and the removal of the blockage safely by using chemical inhibitors causes great economic and operation time loss. There are several inhibitors that has been used to overcome this problem for several decades; however existing state of the art chemicals have their own operational problems that needs to be addressed. We aim to design and test novel hydrate inhibitors that are suitable for natural gas pipelines and its processing facilities and we are aiming to provide more effective and sustainable reservoir utilization and processing natrual gas reservoirs improving theflow assurance.

In this work, we present the initial findings of a Qatar Foundation (QF) funded project, which deals with the natural gas hydrate formation characteristics of Qatari type gas in both experimental (PVTx) and computational (molecular simulations) methods. We present the data from the two fully automated apparatus: a gas hydrate autoclave and a rocking cell. Hydrate equilibrium curves including growth/dissociation conditions for multi-component systems for several gas mixtures that represent Qatari type natural gas with and without the presence of well known kinetic and thermodynamic hydrate inhibitors. Choline Chloride, Choline Bistriflimide and Choline Acetate were studied in this work. These ionic liquids were used for testing their inhibition performance and their DFT and molecular modeling simulation results were also obtained and compared with the experimental results. They were used at 1% and 5% (wt) and at 5% amount, they showed good hydrate inhibition performance for both pure methane and gas mixtures as well.