[1] Fracture-hosted methane hydrate deposits exist at many sites worldwide. These sites often have hydrate present as vein and fracture fill, as well as disseminated through the pore space. We estimate that thousands to millions of years are required to form fracture systems by hydraulic fracturing driven by occlusion of the pore system by hydrate. This time scale is a function of rates of fluid flow and permeability loss. Low-permeability layers in a sedimentary column can reduce this time if the permeability contrast with respect to the surrounding sediments is of order 10 or greater. Additionally, we find that tensile fracturing produced by hydrate heave around hydrate lenses is a viable fracture mechanism over all but the lowermost part of the hydrate stability zone. With our coupled fluid flow-hydrate formation model we assess fracture formation at four well-studied hydrate provinces: Blake Ridge offshore South Carolina, Hydrate Ridge offshore Oregon, Keathley Canyon Block 151 offshore Louisiana, and the Krishna-Godavari Basin offshore India. We conclude that hydraulic fracturing due to pore pressure buildup is reasonable only at Hydrate Ridge and the Krishna-Godavari Basin owing to sediment age constraints, and that hydrate-filled fractures observed at Blake Ridge and Keathley Canyon Block 151 are formed either by hydrate heave or in preexisting fractures. Our findings offer new insight into the processes and time scales associated with fracture-hosted hydrate deposits, which help further our understanding of hydrate systems.Citation: Daigle, H., and B. Dugan (2010), Origin and evolution of fracture-hosted methane hydrate deposits,

[1] We simulate 1-D, steady, advective flow through a layered porous medium to investigate how capillary controls on solubility including the Gibbs-Thomson effect in fine-grained sediments affect methane hydrate distribution in marine sediments. We compute the increase in pore fluid pressure that results from hydrate occluding the pore space and allow fractures to form if the pore fluid pressure exceeds a fracture criterion. We apply this model to Hydrate Ridge and northern Cascadia, two field sites where hydrates have been observed preferentially filling cm-scale, coarse-grained layers. We find that at Hydrate Ridge, hydrate forms in the coarse-grained layers reaching saturation of 90%, creating fractures through intervening fine-grained layers after 2000 years. At northern Cascadia, hydrate forms preferentially in the coarse-grained layers but 2 × 10 5 years are required to develop the observed hydrate saturations (∼20%-60%), suggesting that hydrate formation rates may be enhanced by an additional source of methane such as in situ methanogenesis. We develop expressions to determine the combinations of sediment physical properties and methane supply rates that will result in hydrate-filled coarse-grained layers separated by hydrate-filled fine-grained layers, the conditions necessary to fracture the fine-grained layers, and the conditions that will lead to complete inhibition of hydrate formation as pore space is constricted. This work illustrates how sediment physical properties control hydrate distribution at the pore scale and how hydrate distribution affects fracturing behavior in marine sediments.

We measured nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation times on samples from Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 333 Sites C0011, C0012, and C0018. We compared our results to permeability, grain size, and specific surface measurements, pore size distributions from mercury injection capillary pressure, and mineralogy from X-ray fluorescence. We found that permeability could be predicted from NMR measurements by including grain size and specific surface to quantify pore networks and that grain size is the most important factor in relating NMR response to permeability. Samples within zones of anomalously high porosity from Sites C0011 and C0012 were found to have different NMR-permeability relationships than samples from outside these zones, suggesting that the porosity anomaly is related to a fundamental difference in pore structure. We additionally estimated the size of paramagnetic sites that cause proton relaxation and found that in most of our samples, paramagnetic material is present mainly as discrete, clay-sized grains. This distribution of paramagnetic material may cause pronounced heterogeneity in NMR properties at the pore scale that is not accounted for in most NMR interpretation techniques. Our results provide important insight into the microstructure of marine sediments in the Nankai Trough.

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Knowledge of porosity and saturation-dependent thermal conductivities is necessary to investigate heat and water transfer in natural porous media such as rocks and soils. Thermal conductivity in a porous medium is affected by the complicated relationship between the topology and geometry of the pore space and the solid matrix. However, as water content increases from completely dry to fully saturated, the effect of the liquid phase on thermal conductivity may increase substantially. Although various methods have been proposed to model the porosity and saturation dependence of thermal conductivity, most are empirical or quasiphysical. In this study, we present a theoretical upscaling framework from percolation theory and the effective-medium approximation, which is called percolation-based effective-medium approximation (P-EMA). The proposed model predicts the thermal conductivity in porous media from endmember properties (e.g., air, solid matrix, and saturating fluid thermal conductivities), a scaling exponent, and a percolation threshold. In order to evaluate our porosity and saturation-dependent models, we compare our theory with 193 porositydependent thermal conductivity measurements and 25 saturation-dependent thermal conductivity data sets and find excellent match. We also find values for the scaling exponent different than the universal value of 2, in insulator-conductor systems, and also different from 0.76, the exponent in conductor-superconductor mixtures, in three dimensions. These results indicate that the thermal conductivity under fully and partially saturated conditions conforms to nonuniversal behavior. This means the value of the scaling exponent changes from medium to medium and depends not only on structural and geometrical properties of the medium but also characteristics (e.g., wetting or nonwetting) of the saturating fluid.

Pore size distributions in rocks may be represented by fractal scaling, and fractal descriptions of pore systems may be used for prediction of petrophysical properties such as permeability, tortuosity, diffusivity, and electrical conductivity. Transverse relaxation time ([Formula: see text]) distributions determined by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements may be used to determine the fractal scaling of the pore system, but the analysis is complicated when internal magnetic field gradients at the pore scale are sufficiently large. Through computations in ideal porous media and laboratory measurements of glass beads and sediment samples, we found that the effect of internal magnetic field gradients was most pronounced in rocks with larger pores and a high magnetic susceptibility contrast between the pore fluid and mineral grains. We quantified this behavior in terms of pore size and Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) half-echo spacing through scaling arguments. We additionally found that the effects of internal field gradients may be mitigated in the laboratory by performing [Formula: see text] measurements with different CPMG half-echo spacings and fitting the apparent fractal dimensions determined by the NMR measurements with a model to determine the true pore system fractal dimension.

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Episodic seafloor methane venting is associated with focused fluid flow through fracture systems at many sites worldwide. We investigate the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and transient gas pressures at southern Hydrate Ridge, offshore Oregon, USA. Two colocated seismic surveys, acquired 8 years apart, at Hydrate Ridge show seismic amplitude variations interpreted as migration of free gas in a permeable conduit, Horizon A, feeding an active methane hydrate province. The geophysical surveys also reveal transients in gas venting to the water column. We propose that episodic gas migration and pressure fluctuations in the reservoir underlying the regional hydrate stability zone (RHSZ) at southern Hydrate Ridge influence methane supply to the RHSZ and are linked with periodic fracturing and seafloor methane venting. We model the effect of pore pressure variations within the deep methane source on fracturing behavior with a 1D model that couples multiphase flow, hydrate accumulation, and pore pressure buildup. As the reservoir pressure increases, fractures open when the pore pressure exceeds the hydrostatic vertical effective stress. Gas then flows through the fractures and vents at the seafloor while hydrate precipitates in the fracture system. We show that active seafloor gas venting occurs for approximately 30 years, and that the available methane reservoir is exhausted 30 to 55 years after the onset of pressure buildup. This provides important constraints on the time scale of transient fluid flow at southern Hydrate Ridge, and illustrates how pore pressure pulses affect fluid flow and fracturing behavior in active methane hydrate provinces.