About Gas Hydrate

What is it?

Gas hydrates, discovered by Michael Faraday in the early 19th century, are crystalline compounds that are formed through hydrogen bonding under conditions where solid ice would not form. Gas hydrates are a subgroup of clathrates which are compounds formed by the inclusion of molecules of one kind within cavities in the crystal lattice of another. Clathrates display no chemical bonding between the host and guest molecules, a condition which is a key characteristic of clathrates.

The term "hydrate" is applied to clathrates in which the structural molecules are water (H₂O) and guest sites are occupied by gas molecules. The guest molecules are linked to the framework by energetically favorable van der Waals forces, stabilizing the framework. Most common guest molecules are methane, ethane, propane, isobutene, butane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. Chlorine and xenon also form hydrate

A crystal form manifests order on the molecular level, which is characteristic to many compounds. Clathrates can form spontaneously under certain pressure temperature conditions. As an example, methane hydrates are dependant on pressures that are usually in excess of one atmosphere (STP), which forces a re-ordering of the lattice water molecules into their 3-dimensional array and inserts the guest methane molecule into the structure. Methane hydrate has the highest energy density of any naturally occurring form of methane (184,000 btu/ft³for the hydrate, and 1,150 btu/ft³ for methane gas; in contrast LNG, which is an cryogenic industrial liquid form of methane, is about 430,000 btu/ft³). Clearly, methane hydrate is an attractive economic target as a source of methane (i.e., energy), especially when it occurs relatively close to the Earth's or seabed surface.

Production of new fresh water supplies by desalination of seawater has the potential to alleviate water shortages, but desalination is presently expensive, especially where water contains suspended sediments and man-made pollutants such as petroleum products, which must first be removed. Nonetheless, where no new fresh water supplies are available, desalination is the only viable answer to the problem of increasing water supplies.

Each desalination technology extracts fresh water in a different way and each method has a particular range of naturally occurring physical, chemical, and thermodynamic constraints and costs. The conventional desalination technologies are now relatively mature, having been introduced many years ago and improved greatly over time. Improving the efficiencies of the existing methods of desalination has thus become a matter of fine-scale adjustment. Dramatic improvement in raising the volumes of water produced or in lowering the costs of desalination is only possible by introducing new technology, which brings with it a new range of physical and cost factors.

MDS has developed technologies that will revolutionize the desalination world, being cost effective, environmentally safe and energy efficient.