title: Carbon dioxide hydrate phase equilibrium and cage occupancy calculations using ab initio intermolecular potentials.
abstract: Gas hydrate deposits are receiving increased attention as potential locations for CO2 sequestration, with CO2 replacing the methane that is recovered as an energy source. In this scenario, it is very important to correctly characterize the cage occupancies of CO2 to correctly assess the sequestration potential as well as the methane recoverability. In order to predict accurate cage occupancies, the guest–host interaction potential must be represented properly. Earlier, these potential parameters were obtained by fitting to experimental equilibrium data and these fitted parameters do not match with those obtained by second virial coefficient or gas viscosity data. Ab initio quantum mechanical calculations provide an independent means to directly obtain accurate intermolecular potentials. A potential energy surface (PES) between H2O and CO2 was computed at the MP2/aug-cc-pVTZ level and corrected for basis set superposition error (BSSE), an error caused due to the lower basis set, by using the half counterpoise method. Intermolecular potentials were obtained by fitting Exponential-6 and Lennard-Jones 6-12 models to the ab initio PES, correcting for many-body interactions. We denoted this model as the “VAS” model. Reference parameters for structure I carbon dioxide hydrate were calculated using the VAS model (site–site ab initio intermolecular potentials) as Δμ(w)(0) = 1206 ± 2 J/mol and ΔH(w)(0) = 1260 ± 12 J/mol. With these reference parameters and the VAS model, pure CO2 hydrate equilibrium pressure was predicted with an average absolute deviation of less than 3.2% from the experimental data. Predictions of the small cage occupancy ranged from 32 to 51%, and the large cage is more than 98% occupied. The intermolecular potentials were also tested by calculating the pure CO2 density and diffusion of CO2 in water using molecular dynamics simulations.
authors: National Energy Technological Laboratory , Morgantown, West Virginia 26506, United States.
authors: Srinath C
authors: SC
authors: Velaga
authors: Brian J
authors: BJ
authors: Anderson