Global Gas Hydrate Resource Blows Global Natural Gas Resource Out of the Water

The world has a lot of methane hydrate. A Minerals Management Service study in 2008 estimated methane hydrate resources in the northern Gulf of Mexico at 21,000 trillion cubic feet, or 100 times current U.S. reserves of natural gas. The combined energy content of methane hydrate may exceed all other known fossil fuels, according to the DOE. _ABCNews

Did you catch that? Gas hydrates just in the northern Gulf of Mexico -- an estimated 100 X (!) the current US reserves of natural gas.

Given that the worldwide resource of gas hydrates is huge, the next question is: Are these resources safely accessible? The answer from a large field research project in Alaska appears to be "yes."

Methane could be extracted by lowering pressure or increasing temperature in an underground reservoir.

"One of the issues with that, though, is that you are melting the ice, and adding a lot of gas and water to the reservoir, which can compromise the reservoir's strength," Boswell said.

The Alaska research focused on a method aimed at preserving the underground ice structure. The extraction technique was based on studies done by ConocoPhillips and the University of Bergen in Norway. Researchers in a laboratory injected carbon dioxide into methane hydrate. CO2 molecules swapped places with methane molecules, freeing the methane to be harvested but preserving the ice.

The DOE worked with ConocoPhillips and Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. to see if it would work in the field. They named the North Slope well Ignik Sikumi, an Inupiat Eskimo phrase that translates as "fire in the ice."

Researchers injected 210,000 cubic feet of carbon dioxide and nitrogen into the underground reservoir through perforated pipe. Instruments measured pressure, temperature and produced gases. They tracked injected gases without fracturing the formation.

Scientists collected data from 30 days of methane production, five times longer than anyone had done before. They are now trying to determine if methane produced was from an exchange with CO2, a reaction to the nitrogen, or a reaction to pressure changes down the hole.

Researchers are optimistic. _ABCNews

Consider the map above, and the comparative graph of different hydrocarbon resources. Yes, the reality is that the amounts of all of the hydrocarbons listed in the graphic are being badly underestimated. That is the nature of geological estimates -- necessarily conservative in nature.

But we know enough about how gas hydrates are formed to understand that they are -- to a large extent -- a renewable resource. If you can not comprehend how this could be the case, you have some interesting reading ahead of you. Don't let me keep you from it. ;-)

Natural Gas Gives Humans Time to Move to Nuclear

The explosion in the available natural gas resource -- from the shale gas bonanza to the coming gas hydrates boom -- should reassure us that we have time to move to advanced nuclear fission, and eventually fusion. For the next few decades, it is likely that natural gas -- particularly LNG and GTL -- will assume a rapidly growing role in the global energy trade.

New giant gas fields have been discovered in such previously unpromising places as the Mediterranean off Israel’s shores and deep Atlantic waters offshore near Brazil. There are extensive deposits of gas-bearing shales in Europe (particularly in Poland) and enormous resources in Asia. Recent reductions in the cost of gas liquefaction coupled with increased sizes of LNG tankers (they now rival the size of ships carrying crude oil) made LNG into a trade equivalent of oil: It can now be transported to consumers on any continent, bought without restrictive long-term contracts, and delivered at increasingly affordable prices. The totals speak for themselves: Global LNG trade rose roughly eightfold between 1980 and 2010, and it now accounts for 30 percent of the worldwide natural gas trade.

...Before the end of 2005, the U.S. price of natural gas rose above $15/1,000 cubic feet, nearly 12 times the all-time low reached in 1995. Production was down by about 8 percent compared to 2001, news reports speculated about supply shortages, and gas companies were gearing for expanded imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from overseas. Six years later, by the second week of April 2012, the market price of U.S. natural gas fell to less than $2/1,000 cubic feet (to levels not seen since January 2002), nationwide gas extraction in 2011 was nearly 12 percent above the 2009 level, and record production was expected in 2012, when all storages would be filled to capacity. No wonder that gas companies are now planning to export LNG, and that new drilling projects have been shelved in the anticipation of gas glut.

...Little has to be said about high oil prices (the price spread between liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons has reached an unprecedented level), but the conversion efficiencies achievable by furnaces and turbines burning natural gas are not sufficiently appreciated. New, super-efficient household gas furnaces convert up to 97 percent of the fuel into heat; combined-cycle generation (using the waste heat from a gas turbine to raise steam and generate more electricity in an associated steam turbine) now produces electricity with 60 percent efficiency (and 70 percent will be possible in the future).

This amazingly abrupt change of gas fortunes has been due to the rising production of shale gas. _Vaclav Smil

But it is not just shale gas that will drive this multi-decadal boom in the importance of natural gas. Brian Westenhaus expands on recent coverage of the impending rise of gas hydrates. Gas hydrates represent more hydrocarban than all the other hydrocarbon resources combined. A recent US DOE announcement revealed that US and Japanese researchers had succeeded in finding a safe and viable means of tapping into the vast global gas hydrate deposits.

As gas supplies expand, the global trade of LNG will continue to rise. But even more important than the rise of the LNG trade, improved methods of utilising gas in producing electricity, liquid fuels, high value chemicals, polymers, lubricants, and more, point to at least a few decades of relative abundance of energy and materials that the doomers said could never be.

And even more importantly, the coming multi-decadal respite from the long-predicted energy scarcity will allow humans time enough to develop safer, cheaper, more reliable, and more efficient scalable nuclear power plants. Fission will become a better method of producing power and process heat. Next will come fusion. After that, we are likely to discover that we do not understand physics or the universe nearly as well as we had thought.

By then, we should be ready to begin to learn.

Important Key to Unlocking Vast Gas Hydrate Resource Announced by US DOE

Methane hydrates represent the largest resource of hydrocarbons in the planetary crust. Up until now, humans had not devised a good way to tap into this immense energy wealth. But a report from the DOE today may point the way to a new era in abundant energy for human societies:

May 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department on Wednesday announced a breakthrough in research into tapping a possibly vast fuel resource that could eventually bolster already massive U.S. natural gas reserves.

By injecting a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a methane hydrate formation on Alaska's North Slope, the department was able to produce a steady flow of natural gas in the first field test of this method. The test was done from mid-February to about mid-April this year

"While this is just the beginning, this research could potentially yield significant new supplies of natural gas," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.

The department, which partnered with ConocoPhillips and Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp for the test, said it will offer $6.5 million this year for further research on tapping methane hydrates, and will request an additional $5 million for research next year.

Gerald Holder, dean of the engineering program at University of Pittsburgh and who has worked with the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory on the hydrate issue, said before this announcement he had been skeptical about what researchers would be able to accomplish. He said the main problem until now was finding a way to extract natural gas from solid hydrates without adding a whole lot of steps that made the process too expensive, so the success of this new test is significant. "It makes the possibility of recovering methane from hydrates much more likely," Holder said. _Reuters

While it is true that experts are probably understating the actual resource of gas hydrates by a significant factor, the same could be said for estimates of crude oil, coal, natural gas, bitumen, and kerogen resources.

But today's announcement should initiate renewed research in labs around the world, toward devising more efficient and economical ways of extracting gas hydrates from the enormous, "quasi-renewable" resource.

Why do we say that gas hydrates are quasi-renewable sources of energy? If you do not understand that, then you have not been paying attention. Try a little harder, please.

Methane Clathrate Exploratory Research in Alaska

One intriguing idea for the simultaneous recovery of energy and sequestration of global warming gas is proposed by the transformation of methane hydrates to carbon dioxide hydrates with the injection of liquid CO2. Here we use molecular dynamics simulations to show that the replacement can take place without melting of the network of hydrogen-bonded water molecules. Depending on the distance to the interface between the liquid CO2 and solid clathrate hydrate, we find that the replacement occurs either via direct swapping of methane and CO2 or via a transient co-occupation of both methane and CO2 in one cavity. Our results suggest that, with a careful design of the operation condition, it is possible to replace methane from methane hydrates with CO2 in the solid phase without much change in the geological stability. _ACS Abstract

ACS
A team of American and Japanese researchers are in Alaska this month to test a new method of extracting methane hydrates from rich Arctic resources. They intend to inject CO2 into the hydrates in hopes that the waste gas will replace the more valuable methane in the ice cage, freeing up the methane for extraction and use.

This month, scientists will test a new way to extract methane from beneath the frozen soil of Alaska: they will use waste carbon dioxide from conventional wells to force out the desired natural gas.

...The test will use the Ignik Sikumi well, which was drilled on an ice platform in Prudhoe Bay last winter. Specialized equipment has been installed, including fibre-optic cables to measure the temperature down the well, and injection pipes for the CO2. “None of this is standard equipment; it had to be built to design,” says Boswell.

...During the test, the researchers will inject nitrogen gas into the hydrate deposit to try to push away any free water in the system, which would otherwise freeze into hydrates on exposure to CO2 and block up the well. The next phase is to pump in isotopically labelled CO2, and let it ‘soak’ for a week before seeing what comes back up. This will help to test whether the injected carbon is really swapping places with the carbon in the hydrates. Finally, the team will depressurize the well and attempt to suck up all the methane and carbon dioxide. This will also give them a chance to test extraction using depressurization — sucking liquids out of the hydrate deposits to reduce pressure in the well and coax the methane out of the water crystals. “We’ll continue to depressurize until we run out of time or money, and see how much methane we can get out that way,” says Boswell. _Nature

Methane, trapped in an icy cage of water molecules, occurs in permafrost and, in even greater quantities, beneath the ocean floor. It forms only under specific pressure and temperature conditions. These conditions are especially prevalent in the ocean along the continental shelves, as well as in the deeper waters of semi-enclosed seas (see graphic).

World reserves of the frozen gas are enormous. Geologists estimate that significantly more hydrocarbons are bound in the form of methane hydrate than in all known reserves of coal, natural gas and oil combined. "There is simply so much of it that it cannot be ignored," says leading expert Gerhard Bohrman of the Research Center for Ocean Margins... _DerSpiegel

As humans devise more and better ways to utilise methane in place of crude oil, it makes sense to learn how to extract the richest reserves of methane in the crust.

We do not yet know how much of the methane resource originates abiotically in the mantle -- and thus can be theoretically seen as "renewable methane." It is likely to be substantial. And thanks to the giant tectonic plate mechanism, with ongoing subduction of organics-rich oceanic crusts under continental crusts, biogenic methane is, to a large extent, renewable as well -- on an extended time scale, and on a continuous basis. Where do you think most of these methane hydrates came from in the first place? No matter. There are a lot more where those came from.

Japan and the US Team to Explore North Slope Methane Hydrates

Methane hydrate is methane that is locked in ice. Huge amounts of methane are available for economical production via gas hydrates as soon as humans learn to produce them economically and cleanly. The Japanese have been particularly active in researching ways to produce methane from hydrates cleanly and efficiently.

Japan has been looking to diversify its energy resources since the powerful March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant northeast of Tokyo.

Resource-poor Japan relies heavily on energy imports from the Middle East and until recently met one third of its electricity needs with nuclear power...Discover

Methane hydrates are widely present around the globe, particularly under the deep seafloor, but also in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. The US DOE is now partnering with Conoco Phillips and the Japan Oil Gas and Metals National Corporation to test technologies for producing methane hydrates on Alaska's North Slope.

The collaborative testing will take place under the auspices of a Statement of Intent for Cooperation in Methane Hydrates signed in 2008 and extended in 2011 by DOE and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The production tests are the next step in both US and Japanese national efforts to evaluate the response of gas hydrate reservoirs to alternative gas hydrate production concepts. The tests will provide information to inform potential future extended-duration tests.

The tests will utilize the “Iġnik Sikumi” (Iñupiaq for “fire in the ice”) gas hydrate field trial well, a fully instrumented borehole that was installed in the Prudhoe Bay region by ConocoPhillips and the Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory earlier this year.

...The current test plans call for roughly 100 days of continuous operations from January to March 2012. Tests will include the initial field trial of a technology that involves injecting carbon dioxide into methane-hydrate-bearing sandstone formations, resulting in the swapping of CO2 molecules for methane molecules in the solid-water hydrate lattice, the release of methane gas, and the permanent storage of CO2 in the formation. This field experiment will be an extension of earlier successful tests of the technology conducted by ConocoPhillips and their research partners in a laboratory setting.

Following the exchange tests, the team will conduct a 1-month evaluation of an alternative methane-production method called depressurization. This process involves pumping fluids out of the borehole to reduce pressure in the well, which results in dissociation of methane hydrate into methane gas and liquid water. The method was successfully demonstrated during a 1-week test conducted by Japan and Canada in northwestern Canada in 2008.　 _GCC

You can see from the resource chart below, that methane hydrates may well represent the largest source for hydrocarbons in the accessible areas of the planet. With clean and economic access to this huge resource -- a mother lode of energy -- humans are not likely to run low on fuels for hundreds of years.

Although some research has been carried out in the past, little is known about the location, formation, decomposition, or actual quantities of methane hydrates. However, national and international research and exploration over the last 20 years by various governmental and industrial entities have resulted in general agreement that methane hydrates should be evaluated as a potential primary energy source for the future. _ORNL

Should Alaskan North Slope methane hydrates prove amenable to clean and economical production, expect significant investment in gas-to-liquids (GTL) production on the North Slope.

Original story

More:

Methane hydrates will form where methane and water are present under the right temperature and pressure conditions, making the Gulf of Mexico a likely location for large amounts of the resource said Arthur Johnson, a petroleum geologist and consultant for Hydrate Energy International in Kenner, La.

“It is an absolutely enormous resource potential, but of course you have to be able to extract it safely, and the other thing is economics,” Johnson said. “If you have to put more energy into it than you’re getting out, it’s not a resource.”

Johnson said estimates suggest tens of thousands of trillion cubic feet of natural gas are tied up in hydrate reservoirs beneath the floor of the ocean and in the permafrost in Arctic regions. One cubic foot of methane hydrate yields about 164 cubic feet of gas.

What it comes down to is economics, said Davy Kong, spokeswoman for ConocoPhillips.


“Many experts believe that methane hydrates hold significant potential to supply this clean fossil fuel,” Kong said. “At present, the technology does not exist to produce methane economically from hydrates. This trial is an important first step in analyzing a production technology with potential both to produce this resource and to sequester carbon dioxide in the process.” _Politico_via_GWPF

As the article above points out, having multiple large sources of energy provides us with redundancy, in case any one energy source is victimised by irrational government : green policies.

More on Methane Clathrates

Japan has the most ambitious plans for developing its methane clathrate resources. But other countries which are investigating developing undersea methane hydrates include Canada, China, South Korea, and the US. And no wonder -- frozen methane clathrates may contain twice the amount of carbon as all known fossil fuels combined.

Faux environmentalists, carbon hysterics, and peak oil doomers are all agreed that any energy resource this promising should be left alone. But people who work solving real-world problems have a different attitude. Rather than obstructing crucial energy resources, problem-solvers want to develop a wide variety of abundant, clean, and versatile energy sources.

Methane trapped in marine sediments as a hydrate represents such an immense carbon reservoir that it must be considered a dominant factor in estimating unconventional energy resources; the role of methane as a 'greenhouse' gas also must be carefully assessed.
Dr. William Dillon,
U.S. Geological Survey
Hydrates store immense amounts of methane, with major implications for energy resources and climate, but the natural controls on hydrates and their impacts on the environment are very poorly understood.

Gas hydrates occur abundantly in nature, both in Arctic regions and in marine sediments. Gas hydrate is a crystalline solid consisting of gas molecules, usually methane, each surrounded by a cage of water molecules. It looks very much like water ice. Methane hydrate is stable in ocean floor sediments at water depths greater than 300 meters, and where it occurs, it is known to cement loose sediments in a surface layer several hundred meters thick.

The worldwide amounts of carbon bound in gas hydrates is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth.

This estimate is made with minimal information from U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other studies. Extraction of methane from hydrates could provide an enormous energy and petroleum feedstock resource. Additionally, conventional gas resources appear to be trapped beneath methane hydrate layers in ocean sediments. _USGS

Augmenting Natural Gas with Methane Hydrates . . .

EES.LANL.GOV
Methane hydrates are found worldwide in large quantities -- under the seabed, under the arctic tundra, and in other parts unknown. Intensive research has led to increasingly feasible methods of harvesting these frozen methane hydrates -- which when added to huge new terrestrial natural gas finds will increase methane supplies worldwide significantly.

the U.S. Department of Energy's Methane Hydrate Research and Development Program has made considerable progress in the past five years toward understanding and developing methane hydrate as a possible energy resource.

"DOE's program and programs in the national and international research community provide increasing confidence from a technical standpoint that some commercial production of methane from methane hydrate could be achieved in the United States before 2025," said Charles Paull, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and senior scientist, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. "With global energy demand projected to increase, unconventional resources such as methane hydrate become important to consider as part of the future U.S. energy portfolio and could help provide more energy security for the United States."

Methane hydrate, a solid composed of methane and water, occurs in abundance on the world's continental margins and in permafrost regions, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's North Slope. Although the total global volume of methane in methane hydrate is still debated, estimates yield s that are significant compared with the global supplies of conventional natural gas. The existence of such a large and untapped energy resource has provided a strong global incentive to determine how methane might be produced from methane hydrate safely, economically, and in an environmentally sensible way. _SD

Significant challenges to safe harvesting of frozen methane hydrates remain, and must be overcome before economic use of these massive deposits can become commonplace.

Significant challenges to the use of algal fuels also remain to be tackled, but that doesn't stop some researchers from predicting that algal fuels will be available commercially within 5 years! University of Arizona researchers believe that their new photobioreactor -- dubbed "Accordion" -- will help to accelerate commercial development of algal fuels significantly.

A World Floating In Methane

A recent USGS, US Minerals Management Service, and a group under the management of Chevron have done a survey of methane-rich sand reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico. Brian Westenhaus reports:

...gas hydrate can and does occur at high saturations within reservoir-quality sands in the Gulf of Mexico with highly saturated hydrate-bearing sands discovered in at least in two of three sites drilled. Dr. Collett said, “In addition, we have found gas hydrate in a range of settings, including sand reservoirs, thick sequences of fracture-filling gas hydrates in shales, and potential partially saturated gas hydrates in younger systems. These sites provide a wealth of opportunities for further study and data collection that will enable significant advances in understanding the nature and development of gas hydrate systems.”

The project also featured a number of technical advances, including the use of an advanced suite of logging-while-drilling tools that provided unprecedented three-dimensional images of hydrate-bearing sediments. The wells sited at Walker Ridge, drilled to approximately 3,500 feet below the seafloor, were more than 1,000 feet deeper than any previous gas hydrate research well.

It all looks very good. _NewEnergyandFuel

Methane hydrates -- methane plus water -- have been found under the sea floor and under surface layers around the world. The quantity of methane within the Earth's crust is more than scientists imagined. More methane than oil, coal, conventional gas supplies. No one knows how much more, the exploration has just begun.

Besides methanol, methane is another near-ideal fuel for the coming age of fuel cells.

Methane Clathrates (Hydrates) and More on BTL

Image Source

Up to 2500 gigatonnes of methane clathrates exist frozen in deep sea sedimentary rock. That is roughly ten times more than known global reserves of natural gas. It may take some time to develop the safest and most efficient ways of mining this methane ice.

One problem with extracting this methane is that you have to melt the ice to bring the gas to the surface. In 2002, a team of geologists from Canada and Japan tried injecting hot water into the ice beneath the delta of the McKenzie river in northern Canada. While this released some hydrates, it used a lot of energy.

Now the same group has extracted methane much more efficiently, and without hot water, by pumping air out of drill holes in the frozen structures. This reduced the pressure, and so raised the melting temperature of the ice so the methane could be removed.

The state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, which announced the test results, wants to extract the 7 trillion tonnes of methane thought to be trapped in hydrates in Japanese coastal waters. It hopes this will be the answer to Japan's century-long search for an indigenous source of fuel. Last month, the government approved a plan to commercialise the extraction of the fuel within a decade. __NS

And here is more about the University of Massachussetts' George Huber, and his campaign to make biomass to liquid fuels (BTL) a major player in the energy industry.

Using a catalyst commonly employed in the petroleum industry, Huber and his colleagues heated small amounts of cellulose very quickly for a matter of seconds before cooling it, producing a high-octane liquid similar to gasoline. “The temperature window is very critical,” Huber says. If you heat too slowly, you produce mainly coke—elemental carbon residue. If you heat too fast, you make mainly vapors. The sweet spot, about 1000 degrees per second, transfers roughly half the cellulose’s energy into hydrocarbons. “If we can get 100 percent yield, we estimate the cost to be about a dollar per gallon,” Huber says. “Right now we’re at 50 percent. Can we get 100 percent? I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll bump those numbers up.”
___PopMech

Finding better ways to exploit the plentiful energy sources around us, is a potentially lucrative challenge for industry--and a test for western governments. If the US Congress cannot break its fixation on the idea of returning the superpower to the stone age through idiotic energy policy, the US government will certainly fail the test.

Methane Hydrate Reserves--Up to One Half the Amount of Other Fossil Fuel Reserves Worldwide

Methane hydrates may contain up to half the energy of other fossil fuel reserves. China does not want to be left out of the act, and is actively working to develop the methane hydrates lying in the northern part of the South China Sea.

China announced yesterday it had made a breakthrough in excavating natural gas hydrate, the so-called “flammable ice”, which is believed to be a potential natural energy source. Zhang Hongtao, deputy director-general of China Geological Survey (CGS), said gas hydrate samples were successfully collected from the northern part of the South China Sea last month. China is the fourth country after the United States, Japan and India to make such a technological achievement. Zhang said the development was expected to ease the country’s dependence on oil and coal.

Source
Methane hydrates, or "fire in ice", will require special technologies in order to be exploited, because they lie underwater off continental shelfs. As you can see on the map, the China Sea deposits are not considered among the larger deposits. It is quite likely that current estimates of undersea fossil fuel resources are woefully understated.