Simulation of Methane Hydrate Dissociation and Multiphase Flow with Non-Darcy's Law in Porous Media

Methane hydrate, a potential future energy resource, is known to naturally occur in vast quantities beneath the ocean floor and in permafrost regions. HydrateResSim is a free open-source numerical reservoir simulator software available from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). HydrateResSim, the NETL methane production simulator for hydrate-containing reservoirs, originally developed for NETL by Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL), incorporates the multiphase Darcy's law for gas and liquid into both the mass component balances and the energy conservation equations. However, for the multiphase flow in porous media with fractures or close to the production wellbore, the Darcy's law is not valid. We extended the capability of the HydrateResSim by implementing the non-Darcy's law with two sub-models: a kinetic model and pure thermodynamic model. We present the comparison between results with different formula for the non-Darcy's law and Darcy's law. The importance of the non-Darcy's term is analyzed.