Beaufort expedition studies methane

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory completed a 12-day Beaufort Sea expedition Sept. 26 to gather data on changing concentrations of methane across the Beaufort and information to evaluate methane hydrate as an energy resource in the region.

NETL said in an Oct. 29 Fossil Energy Techline that the Beaufort Sea expedition included research partners from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and gathered data to help understand “fluxes” or changes in the concentration of methane within and across the Beaufort shelf as well as resource data.

“Although not as plentiful in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, methane is about 10 times more potent as a greenhouse gas in terms of its potential contribution to global climate change,” NETL said, leading to concerns that small global climate changes could result in increased methane released from subsurface accumulations on the Arctic shelf. But the methane hydrates, molecules of natural gas trapped in ice crystals, also “represent a potentially vast resource that may have as much energy as all the world’s other fossil fuels combined.”

NETL said the expedition was the first comprehensive and dedicated study of the continental shelf and slope under the Beaufort Sea.

The National Methane Hydrate R&D Act of 2000 mandated a study program to understand hydrate as a future energy resource and its role in the global climate cycle and the expedition was one of the first major field-based projects to place a dominant focus on the global climate aspects of this issue in the United States, NETL said.

—Petroleum News