Self-adaptive gas flow and phase change behaviors during hydrate exploitation by alternate injection of N_(2) and CO_(2)

Since hydrate resources play a part of the stratigraphic framework structure in sediments,establishing a safe and economic method for hydrates exploitation remains the primary challenge to this day.Among the proposed methods,the spontaneous displacement of CH_(4) from hydrate cages by CO_(2) seems to be a perfect mechanism to address gas production and CO_(2) storage,especially in today's strong demand for carbon reduction and replacing clean energy.After extensive lab researches,in the past decade,injecting a mixture of CO_(2) and small molecule gas has become a key means to enhance displacement efficiency and has great potential for application.However,there is a lack of in-depth research on gas flow in the reservoir,while the injected gas always passes through low-saturated hydrate areas with high permeability and then occurs gas channel in a short term,finally resulting in the decreases in gas production efficiency and produced gas quality.Therefore,we explored a new injection-production mode of alternate injection of N2 and CO_(2) in order to fully coordinate the advantages of N_(2) in enhanced hydrate decomposition and CO_(2) in solid storage and heat compensation.These alternate"taking"and"storing"processes perfectly repair the problem of the gas channel,achieving self-regulation effect of CH_(4) recovery and CO_(2) storage.The 3-D experimental results show that compared to the mixed gas injection,CH_(4) recovery is increased by>50%and CO_(2) storage is increased by>70%.Additionally,this alternate injection mode presented a better performance in CH_(4) concentration of produced gas and showed outstanding N_(2) utilization efficiency.Further,we analyzed its self-adaptive gas flow mechanism and proposed an application model of"one injection and multiple production".We look forward to this study accelerating the application of CO_(2)-CH_(4) replacement technology.