Abstract. The pore habits of gas hydrate in natural sediment
matrices provide essential clues for understanding physical (mechanical,
thermal, hydraulic, and electrical) properties of hydrate-bearing sediments,
yet there are no tools that can directly visualize the pore habits of
natural gas hydrate other than indirect interpretation based on core-scale
or field-scale observations. A significant challenge is to obtain a
mini-core from pressure cores retrieved from natural reservoirs for
high-resolution micro-CT (computed tomography) scans while maintaining pressure and temperature conditions required for stability of gas hydrate
during all operational steps including manipulation, cutting, transferring,
sub-coring and CT scanning. We present a new set of tools for pore-scale micro-CT imaging of natural hydrate-bearing sediments while maintaining
pressure and temperature control. The tests with laboratory-prepared cores and pressure cores successfully demonstrate the capability of this set of
tools to subsample a mini-core from pressure cores, transfer the mini-core
to an X-ray transparent core holder, and conduct micro-CT scans.
Successfully obtained CT images prove the functionality of this set of
tools.
Tools for pressure core sub-coring and pore-scale micro-CT (computed tomography) scans