Hydrate Formation and Dissociation Processes

The most challenging and intriguing questions regarding hydrates concern how hydrates form, dissociate, and are inhibited with time. The previous chapter provides the foundation required to understand these time-dependent processes. Time-dependent hydrate phenomena are substantially more challenging than time-independent phenomena of structure and thermodynamics. One can expect a decrease in accuracy of time-dependent measurements and models by at least one order of magnitude relative to their thermodynamic counterparts, as found in Chapters 4 through 6. 

Due to the difficulty of quantifying time-dependent phenomena, the present chapter deals with hydrate formation and dissociation in laboratory systems. The principles are extended to hydrate formation/dissociation/inhibition in pipelines in Chapter 8 on hydrates in production, processing, and transportation. Dissociation in porous media, such as the assessment of gas evolution from in situ hydrate reserves using hydrate reservoir models is discussed in Chapter 7 on hydrates in the earth. The present chapter is also restricted mostly to the time-dependent properties of structures I and II due to the limited time-dependent data on structure H. The experimental tools that have been applied to measure hydrate time-dependent phenomena are presented in Chapter 6. 

The purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with an understanding of time-dependent phenomena for the following  

Hydrate nucleation (Section 3.1), which is a stochastic process, 

Hydrate growth (Section 3.2), which may be controlled by kinetic, heat, 

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