The entire natural gas resource base in the United States is less than one percent of the gas trapped inside hydrates on the ocean shelves.1 Methane hydrates are ice-like crystal
cages of water molecules with individual methane molecules inside the water cages that form at 276.6 K, just a few degrees above the melting point of ice, and in high pressures excess of 68 bar.2
Unfortunately, mining gas hydrates could result in uncontrollable decomposition and emission of green house gas, and gas hydrate inhibitors, such as methanol, are costly and required to avoid plugs
in gas pipelines. Molecular-scale computer simulation can provide insight on these problems by allowing studies of in situ gas hydrate growth and dissolution in short time scales on a molecular
level that cannot be obtained experimentally. Unfortunately, while there has been a lot of study on bulk hydrates there have been no studies of hydrate growth and dissolution in confined pores such
as would be found in the rocks in which hydrates are found. This forms the motivation for this project. The major goal of this project was to determine the melting point of methane hydrate using an
intermolecular potential model for water. A second task was to set up simulations to determine the melting point of a seed crystal of methane hydrate in a liquid hydrate melt.
Publisher
Cornell Center for Materials Research
Date
2007-08-29
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Additional Notes
Support for the CCMR is provided through the NSF Grant DMR 0520404, part of the NSF MRSEC Program. Additional support is provided by Cornell University, the State of New York, and
by industrial sources.
Guest - January 09, 2009
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