What's it like inside a natural gas cavern on Earth?
I suppose natural gas underground caverns on Earth have substantial volume and gas is in gaseous form there.
As such I wonder how it would look like inside such cavern (with artificial light of course). Will one see a rocky sky at big distance?
What is the actual volume of such caverns? It is correct to talk about methane oceans or seas?
Are they empty or the gas is mixed up with solid substance?
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1 Expert Answer
Ben S. answered • 08/21/23
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Will one see a rocky sky at big distance?
Not a rocky sky, but a rocky ceiling.
What is the actual volume of such caverns?
Some caverns are about half a million cubic meters.
It is correct to talk about methane oceans or seas?
This is not a term typically used.
Are they empty or the gas is mixed up with solid substance?
A depleted reservoir would hold natural gas within its pore spaces.
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Gerald E.
By natural gas caverns, I assume you mean the man-made storage caverns used to temporarily store produced gas before it is put into pipes for delivery to customers. These can be salt domes that have large volumes of salt removed by pumping fresh water into them by wells to dissolve the salt and create a cavern. Being inside one would be similar to being in a large cavern in a natural cave system - Luray Cavern, etc. The storage caverns could also be former salt or sand mines that have been converted for gas storage. If you mean the voids that natural gas is stored in the reservoirs, that is totally different. Most natural gas reservoirs are layers (beds) of porous (contains holes, vugs, gaps between rock fragment or crystal grains, fractures) rock that are capped on the top and underneath by less permeable beds of shale, limestone, etc. The pore sizes range from 0.1 mm to perhaps a few mm and are interconnected by very small throats that allow gas to flow to lower pressure areas (permeable). There are no oceans, rivers, etc. of methane or water underground.05/19/20