Instrumental analysis of gas hydrates properties

Gas hydrates attracted intense research interest when it was first recognised some 70 years ago that they were responsible for the blockage of flow lines, valves and well heads, thereby causing great loss of production and other severe safety hazards to the oil and gas industry. After many decades, these compounds are still the topic of research activities in various multi-disciplinary fields, including chemical and petroleum engineering, earth and geophysics, chemistry and environmental sciences. This is not only due to the great impact that these compounds have on the oil and gas industry, but also to the potential applications they have in many evolving areas, including, but not only, natural gas storage and transportation, carbon dioxide sequestration, and sea-water desalination. It is generally accepted that gas hydrates represent the largest source of hydrocarbons on earth, something which has not been appreciated until only recently. Management, either prevention or application or both, of gas hydrates requires a complete knowledge and understanding of the formation, decomposition and inhibition mechanisms of gas hydrates, which in turn demands advanced experimental methods and instrumental techniques for gas hydrate characterisation. This paper reviews a broad range of techniques that have been used for natural gas hydrate characterisation. It includes the basic physical science principles of each method and the gas hydrate properties that each method is capable of detecting, including some modern instrumental analyses that enable direct determination of gas hydrate phases and possible measurement of molecular interactions within the fluid phases. ? 2009 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.