An All-At-Once Newton Strategy for Marine Methane Hydrate Reservoir Models

Shubhangi Gupta, Barbara Wohlmuth and Matthias Haeckel
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Shubhangi Gupta: GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, Wischhofstraße 1-3, 24148 Kiel, Germany
Barbara Wohlmuth: Department of Mathematics, Technical University of Munich, Boltzmannstraße 3, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
Matthias Haeckel: GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, Wischhofstraße 1-3, 24148 Kiel, Germany

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-29

Abstract: The migration of methane through the gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ) in the marine subsurface is characterized by highly dynamic reactive transport processes coupled to thermodynamic phase transitions between solid gas hydrates, free methane gas, and dissolved methane in the aqueous phase. The marine subsurface is essentially a water-saturated porous medium where the thermodynamic instability of the hydrate phase can cause free gas pockets to appear and disappear locally, causing the model to degenerate. This poses serious convergence issues for the general-purpose nonlinear solvers (e.g., standard Newton), and often leads to extremely small time-step sizes. The convergence problem is particularly severe when the rate of hydrate phase change is much lower than the rate of gas dissolution. In order to overcome this numerical challenge, we have developed an all-at-once Newton scheme tailored to our gas hydrate model, which can handle rate-based hydrate phase change coupled with equilibrium gas dissolution in a mathematically consistent and robust manner.

Keywords: methane hydrate; phase transitions; NCP; nonlinear complementary constraints; semi-smooth Newton method; active-sets strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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