AN INTERNATIONAL EFFORT TO COMPARE GAS HYDRATE RESERVOIR SIMULATORS

Abstract

This collaborative effort to compare the world’s leading gas hydrate reservoir simulators is designed primarily to exchange information and insight that will lead to the improvement in simulation capability of experimental and naturally occurring gas hydrate accumulations. The initial phase of the code comparison activity achieved the simulation of five problems of increasing complexity by five different reservoir simulators: CMG STARS, HydrateResSim, MH21 HYDRES, STOMP-HYD, and TOUGH+HYDRATE. The cases run, the results obtained, and an analysis of those results is available to the gas hydrates community through the DOE/NETL website[1]. Results of the Problem 1 (non-isothermal multi-fluid transition to equilibrium (no hydrate); and Problem 2 (closed-domain gas hydrate dissociation) indicated very close agreement among the simulators. This agreement suggests that all had consistently captured the basics of mass and heat transfer, as well as overall process of gas hydrate dissociation. Problem 3 (dissociation in a one