Hydrate formation in natural gas processing systems is a well-known design and operating consideration that must be handled properly in order to avoid costly production losses or serious safety hazards. A series of methodologies and tools are available for engineers to predict whether hydrate formation should be a concern in their particular situations. Charts and equations published by recognized institutions, such as the GPSA handbook, provide widely accepted estimations for this purpose.

As computing power has become more accessible however, more rigorous and accurate calculations are also available to engineers that, in some cases, will show significant differences in the predicted formation conditions. The fact is that all these various methods have their own strengths and weaknesses and, depending on the specifics of the problem at hand, some methods will perform better than others.

In order to address this dilemma, engineers usually rely on the common practice of applying all the available tools they can access and then making a judgement depending on the results produced by these various tools. Recognizing that there is no single solution that works for all cases Process Ecology Inc has produced a novel tool that implements the most widely used methods in the industry, together with the most recent rigorous methods for hydrate formation calculations in such a way that it is easy to compare the results from all of them in a single software.