Congress probably will not follow President Bush’s recommendation to cut off federal oil and gas research, U.S Sen. Lisa Murkowski said.
Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Congress probably will continue to support federal research into methane hydrates.
Murkowski commented April 7 while talking to reporters about a bill she introduced to speed study of the potentially vast energy source.
The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, would authorize spending $165 million through 2010. A separate appropriations bill also would be needed.
The Bush administration, in the proposed budget released in early February, said it wants to eliminate federal spending on oil and gas research.
The programs cost about $79 million this fiscal year. Bush suggested $20 million next year, enough for “orderly termination.”
Murkowski said Congress probably will not follow that advice.
“I do think that there is a good chance that we get it back in there,” she said.
Huge resource for Alaska
Methane hydrate is a solid form of methane trapped in water molecules under high pressure and, on Alaska’s North Slope, cold conditions.
Murkowski said Alaska has close to 600 trillion cubic feet of onshore methane hydrates, dwarfing the 33 trillion cubic feet of conventional gas. (Alaska Division of Oil and Gas Director Mark Myers said in January that 35 tcf is known at Prudhoe Bay and Point Thomson, but that federal and state geologists believe the North Slope and offshore conventional mean technically recoverable undiscovered resource potential exceeds 236 tcf.) Counting offshore hydrates, the total is 32,000 trillion cubic feet, enough to power the country for 1,000 years at projected consumption rates, Murkowski said.
Methane hydrates, however, are unstable and no one has found a certain method for collecting them for commercial use.
Myers visited Washington over the winter to ask for $70 million to test production methods. Hydrates found in most areas of the world are mixed with sediment and hard to extract, Myers said, but at Prudhoe Bay they appear to be concentrated above the existing natural gas cap and just below permafrost.
Murkowski’s bill is an expansion of legislation proposed five years ago by Sen. Akaka. Besides authorizing the $165 million, it would establish a scientific peer review process for projects, expand research to investigate commercial development authorize one or more production test wells.
—Petroleum News contributed to this article.
