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851 Neyland Dr, Knoxville, TN 37996

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Title: "Pore-scale gas hydrate behaviors within sediment matrix."

Abstract
Gas hydrate is an ice-like compound with guest molecules trapped in cages made of water molecules. Natural gas hydrate, mostly methane hydrate, is found in sediments along continental margins and in permafrost regions where it is stable under high pressure and low temperature. Organic carbon stored in gas hydrate is comparable to the sum of all traditional fossil fuels, and gas hydrate is, as expected, considered as both a potential energy resource and environmental hazard if released to the atmosphere. Therefore, it is critical to understand the behaviors of gas hydrate within the sediment matrix. The first step towards the goal is to understand how gas hydrate forms in nature. Hydrate formation is particle-displacive in fine-grained sediments, but pore-invasive in coarse-grained sediments, as found in nature and observed in laboratory experiments. This presentation focuses on the hydrate formation process in both cases: the governing mechanism that results in the morphology difference, associated mass and energy transfer, characteristics of the resultant hydrate distribution, and potential influence on physical properties of the hosting sediments.

Bio
Liang Lei has been a post-doc research fellow at National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Morgantown, West Virginia, since he obtained his PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017. During his PhD, his work centered on the geo-hydro-chemo-mechanical properties of hydrate bearing fine-grained sediments (soil + water + methane hydrate + methane gas), with emphasis on their fundamental understanding in view of gas production. As part of the research, he built a micro-CT scanner to visualize the physical processes such as hydrate formation and dissociation while the system is under high pressure and low temperature. His current research at NETL aims to establish a link between pore- and core-scale gas hydrate behaviors in the sediment matrix under different hydrological-geomechanical conditions, with micro-CT technique specially optimized to visualize methane hydrate coexisting with methane gas, pore fluid, and sand matrix.

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