Posted on 02/20/2010 5:50:51 AM PST by thackney
The U.S. Department of Energy is no longer funding research into possible methane hydrate deposits in the Barrow gas fields on Alaska’s North Slope, Petroleum News has learned. As a consequence, a North Slope Borough research team involving Petrotechnical Resources of Alaska is no longer proceeding with phase two of the research.
“We’re going ahead as a development project and just cutting out the (methane hydrate) science,” Tom Walsh, a managing partner of PRA, told Petroleum News Feb. 17.
The team had planned to drill two methane hydrate test wells and four horizontal development wells in the gas fields but will instead drill six horizontal development wells, Walsh said. The concept behind the previously planned test wells was to verify the presence of methane hydrate in the fields and to try out a methane hydrate production technique.
Robert Dillon from Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office confirmed the cancellation of DOE funding for the Barrow gas fields project. As a consequence of DOE budget cuts the agency did not have the money for the second phase of the project, Dillon told Petroleum News Feb. 17.
“We’ve been asking them to reconsider but so far haven’t been successful in that,” Dillon said.
But there is still DOE funding for two other North Slope methane hydrate projects, one led by BP and the other led by ConocoPhillips, he said.
As reported in the Feb. 14 issue of Petroleum News, a report on the DOE methane hydrate program, published by the National Research Council Jan. 29, had indicated that the Barrow gas field’s methane hydrate project was continuing. However, it now appears that the information in that report was out of date.
The huge volumes of methane locked up in methane hydrate deposits under the North Slope could become a major source of natural gas for export through a future North Slope gas pipeline, and the close proximity of an existing oilfield infrastructure to these deposits has made the deposits a prime focus of methane hydrate research. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are between 25.2 trillion and 157.8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas in these deposits.
Jocelyn Grozic, a hydrate researcher and engineering professor at the University of Calgary, has said this source of energy “could provide energy to North America for the next 64,000 years.”
Maybe not such a bad thing that the Fed is not involved with or have a financial stake in this project. At least the project managers don’t have to act like handout whores and can make decisions purely based on market economics.
157 tcf may sound like a lot of gas and it is quite a bit but it isn’t a whole lot when US consumption is over 20 tcf/year.
Somebody is blowing smoke or doesn’t understand what they are writing.
USGS scientists estimate that the United States has in-place methane resources in methane hydrates of about 320,000 TCF (statistical mean estimate; approximately half of this resource occurs offshore of Alaska...
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs021-01/fs021-01.pdf
Learning how to produce it is the important first step.
You are exactly right, and these resources have been viewed covetously by the UN and the transnationalists for a long time. They don’t want the US to have the technology until they have the political power to force us to treat the hydrates as a “global” resource.
Somebody is blowing smoke or doesn’t understand what they are writing.
So, you are expecting all other sources of NG will cease when they develop hydrate?
The 157 tcf is for North Slope, there are many other hydrate deposits each of our coasts. One plausible explaination of the Bermuda Triangle is the burst of released methane hydrate as there are significant deposits in that region.
NG is our future and can make the US energy independent.
Somebody is blowing smoke or doesn’t understand what they are writing.
So, you are expecting all other sources of NG will cease when they develop hydrate?
The 157 tcf is for North Slope, there are many other hydrate deposits each of our coasts. One plausible explaination of the Bermuda Triangle is the burst of released methane hydrate as there are significant deposits in that region.
NG is our future and can make the US energy independent.
UNCLOS says that coastal nations have a minimum 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone, except that the EEZ can extend even further out if the shelf extends further out.
Yes, but there has been plenty of ink spilled on how, no matter the putative terrotorial limits, these resources really belong to humanity, blah, blah.
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