While there are alternatives for enhancing the surface area to promote hydrate formation (e.g. polyurethane foams and nanoparticles ), preparation of a packed bed of ice from dry water is an obvious choice due to several factors. Firstly, fumed silica is cheap, widely available, harmless, and dry water is rather simple to fabricate. Secondly, dry water has been subject to a few studies already , all of which confirm the kinetically promoting effect of the high specific surface area. Therefore, it is likely that this beneficial effect will also be found at lower temperatures. On the other hand, studies also showed that formation rates cannot be sustained over multiple formationdissociation cycles and that additional stabilizers (e.g. hydrocolloid gelling agent) are helpful to maintain formation rates. Since a poor cycling behavior is detrimental to an economic operation of the HBCC process, in this section, both formation rates as well as their evolution upon continuous cycling are investigated.