The Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de St-Etienne has been founded to develop an experimental and modelling approach of  the dynamics of the Formation and Dissociation of Methane Hydrate in Sediment.

- context

- Step 1 (2002-2005) Ph.D Work of Olivier Bonnefoy. The work has mainly consisted in experimental and modelling of the permeability of synthetic methane hydrate bearing sediment and analogs.

- Step 2 (2005-2008) Ph.D Work of Nicolas Tonnet. A model of dissociation has been proposed by D. N'Guyen Hong in the framework of the UNPLUGGING project. It consists in a heat transfer limited model. This model (N'Guyen et al, 2005) is applicable to small size samples.The step 2 consitis in identifying experimental the consequences of a mass transfer or reaction limited model. At that aim, a model has evaluated the size of the apparatus susceptible to put into evidence such limitation (Tonnet et al, 2006);The apparatus has been built and experiments performed.