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Natural Gas Hydrate (NGH) is a high combustion efficiency clean energy and its reserve is twice as that of natural gas and petroleum, so NGH is the potential resource which could overcome the increasing energy assumption. One of the essential aspects during the exploitation of NGH is to avoid risk, and here in this work, we summarized the relevant management experience to study the critical safety risk in the exploitation of natural gas hydrate. The problems that must be resolved during NGH exploitation were identified through the research on the comparison of the characteristics of conventional gas hydrate mining methods and potential drilling engineering risks and stratum damages in the processes of exploitation. Combined with typical case analysis of gas hydrate mining, it is concluded that the key for safe NGH exploitation is the changes of stratum stress caused by hydrate decomposition; and all safety management experiences should be based on steady drilling and reasonable exploitation to prevent environment, equipment, persons and other aspects damages from layering and stress changes.


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An analysis of the key safety technologies for natural gas hydrate exploitation

Show Author's information Yuan Yang1( )Youbing He1Qinglong Zheng2
School of Geosciences, Yangtze University, Wuhan 430100, P. R. China
Production Engineering Research Institute of HuaBei Oilfields, Langfang 065000, P. R. China

Abstract

Natural Gas Hydrate (NGH) is a high combustion efficiency clean energy and its reserve is twice as that of natural gas and petroleum, so NGH is the potential resource which could overcome the increasing energy assumption. One of the essential aspects during the exploitation of NGH is to avoid risk, and here in this work, we summarized the relevant management experience to study the critical safety risk in the exploitation of natural gas hydrate. The problems that must be resolved during NGH exploitation were identified through the research on the comparison of the characteristics of conventional gas hydrate mining methods and potential drilling engineering risks and stratum damages in the processes of exploitation. Combined with typical case analysis of gas hydrate mining, it is concluded that the key for safe NGH exploitation is the changes of stratum stress caused by hydrate decomposition; and all safety management experiences should be based on steady drilling and reasonable exploitation to prevent environment, equipment, persons and other aspects damages from layering and stress changes.

Keywords: Natural gas hydrate, exploitation, stratum damage, CO2 emulsion replacement.

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Publication history

Received: 11 June 2017
Revised: 25 June 2017
Accepted: 27 June 2017
Published: 25 September 2017
Issue date: September 2017

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© The Author(s) 2017

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Oil and Gas Special Projects (GZHL20120304).

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Published with open access at Ausasia Science and Technology Press on behalf of the Division of Porous Flow, Hubei Province Society of Rock Mechanics and Engineering.

This article is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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