Hydrate Production in Permafrost

4 Case Study 4 Mallik 2002 (Hydrate Production in Permafrost) 

For readers who wish more Mallik 2002 details than the present, a brief overview is referred to the 63-paper compilation in the GSC Bulletin 585 (Dallimore and Collett, 2005) that includes a CD of manuscripts, an interactive-data viewer CD, and expanded charts and maps. 

While the Messoyakhan well was an engineering production application from hydrates, the Mallik 2002 well provided the first scientifically documented evidence that gas could be produced from hydrates. It may be suggested that this concept had been shown before at Messoyakha (Makogon, 1988), however, while there is widespread agreement that hydrates did play some part in Messoyakhan production, some authors (e.g., Collett and Ginsburg, 1998) have suggested that a detailed understanding of the role of hydrates in Messoyakhan production is unclear. 

Another perspective relating Messoyakha to Mallik 2002 is that applications drive research, as suggested in the preface. That is, the engineering production of hydrates in the Messoyakha field over the decade of the 1970s provided an impetus for further research with scientifically enhanced tests at Mallik 2002, which were not feasible at the time of Messoyakhan production. Consider only three differences of many  

Many modern scientific tools were applied to Mallik that were not available at the time of Messoyakha. For example, well logs had advanced substantially so that it was possible to determine, for example, the porosity, permeability, and hydrate saturation of the sediments at Mallik, which were not available at Messoyakha. In addition, reservoir models for hydrate production could be based upon well-constrained Mallik 2002 production data, such as pressure stimulation tests over constrained well intervals or thermal stimulation tests. 

---