This paper presents the experimental study on the scale-up effect of natural gas storage in the form of hydrates in a quiescent reactor. The hydrate formation experiments with respect to gas storage in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) were initially performed in a 10 L reactor to study the scale-up effect by adjusting the mass of water loaded. The results demonstrated that the scale-up effect was very obvious, i.e., the specific hydrate formation rate, the moles of gas consumed per unit mass of water and time, decreased rapidly with the increasing mass of water loaded in the reactor. A multi-deck cell-type vessel was devised as the internals of the reactor to eliminate the scale-up effect, where water was loaded in each cell of the vessel instead of being loaded in the reactor directly and the hydrate formed in all cells of the vessel simultaneously. A double-deck cell-type vessel was set-up and a series of hydrate formation experiments were performed to study the influence of the number of deck and the size of each cell upon the specific formation rate and the storage capacity. The experimental results proved the feasibility of the multi-deck cell-type vessel. The influence of water quality was also studied and the results demonstrated that tap water could be used instead of the expensive distilled water in the formation of hydrates and the most suitable concentration of SDS in tap water was 2000 mg/L. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.