DOE funds $2M in hydrate research

Petroleum News

The Department of Energy said Nov. 7 that it is providing $2 million in funding to five methane hydrate research projects.

• Battelle Memorial Institute in Richland, Wash., will evaluate and contrast advanced concepts for commercial production of gas hydrates against conventional methods centering on thermal stimulation and depressurization and in a second phase the researchers will assess enhancing gas hydrate production at a site on the North Slope. The DOE’s share of this 24-month project is $603,000.

• At Stanford University in California researchers will work on improving interpretation of seismic data to identify and quantify methane hydrate resources with more realistic models of sediments containing gas hydrates and will also develop more efficient methods to characterize hydrate reservoirs to help exploration companies develop more systematic exploration strategies. The DOE’s share of this 24-month project is $384,431.

• Researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, will examine the stability of hydrate-bearing sediments and their effect on a variety of scenarios, including placement of offshore platforms, and will establish principles to enable operators to predict and analyze stability of hydrate-bearing media in ocean subsurface. The DOE portion of this 36-month project is $975,000.

• University of Texas in Austin researchers will examine the use of advanced multi-component ocean-bottom seismic data to detect and characterize hydrate-bearing sediments in the deep oceans and evaluate diagnostic capabilities relative to the cost for ocean-bottom seismic and conventional seismic technologies. The DOE share of this 36-month project is $830,230.

• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Mass., will attempt to better understand whether naturally caused methane releases from hydrates affect the Earth’s climate using core samples previously taken from the Bering Sea to test the hypothesis of hydrate dissociation driving global climate change over the span of a thousand years. The DOE share of this 24-month project is $233,444.

DOE said the total value of the project is some $3.3 million, with university and science partners providing the remaining funds.