Clathrate hydrates
are crucial from the point of view of flow assurance
and future energy resources, as well as potential innovative and sustainable
applications such as gas separation, CO2 sequestration,
district and data center cooling, seawater desalination, and natural
gas storage. Although proof of concept has been demonstrated, significant
progress is necessary in order to achieve industrial-level validation
and commercialization. Most of the applications possess a common requirement
of enhanced kinetics in formation and dissociation. There is a need
for a broader understanding of hydrate nucleation mechanisms, cause-effect
relations, and investigation techniques. The stochastic nature of
hydrate nucleation, confounding cause–effect relations, and
spatial-temporal scales have made it even more challenging to study
nucleation. The use of hydrate promoters, novel reactor configurations
such as porous media in a packed bed, and nanoparticles and hydrogels
necessitates us to obtain further insights about clathrate nucleation.
This review provides an in depth analysis about the characteristics
of clathrate hydrate nucleation and the techniques adopted for studying
nucleation from an application-oriented perspective and enables further
development of clathrate technology toward future applications.
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