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Methane Hydrates are a Promising Energy Resource
Methane hydrates are getting increased attention as a major new source of clean hydrocarbon energy. These enormous deposits of natural gas have never been developed commercially, but research and development has been promising, and expectations are that the gas could begin coming to market within a decade.
Known as flammable ice, methane hydrates are molecules of gas contained in an ice matrix found in permafrost regions of the arctic and on the seafloor at continental margins below 500 meters of depth. Methane hydrates are subject to research both around their role in the global carbon cycle as well as potential commercial development as an energy resource. Hydrates form along the continental margins at low temperatures and high pressures and are distributed around the world, many countries have significant resources of them.
The total quantities of methane hydrates are quite staggering when compared to conventional fossil fuels. It is thought that there is at least twice as much carbon stored in hydrates as there is in all conventional oil, gas, and coal combined, but not all of the hydrates are in formations amenable to development. For instance, the Gulf of Mexico is particularly rich in hydrates with total estimates around 21,000 trillion cubic feet (tcf), but only around 6,700 tcf are considered producible. For comparison the US consumed 26 tcf of natural gas in 2013 and global gas consumption was around 111 tcf. Rough estimates for producible hydrates globally are in the tens of thousands of trillion cubic feet of methane.
There is a great deal of concern about the potential for the melting of hydrates, particularly in the arctic permafrost, that would contribute to global warming. Some researchers theorize that melting permafrost could be part of a tipping point scenario where so much methane is released that it creates out of control global warming and environmental catastrophe. Some permafrost has been documented to be melting, and researchers are actively working to understand the quantities and impacts of the methane releases, but this is still a relatively young area of inquiry with more questions than answers.
Hydrate formations being explored for energy production are distinct from the formations at risk of melting. Only a small subset of hydrates present any potential environmental risk, and likewise only a subset of hydrates are amenable to energy production. Formations at risk of melting are near the surface, while those being explored for energy are deep below the surface.
Carbon dioxide can also form hydrates and this has become a very promising line of research for both carbon sequestration and for energy production. It is a well-documented phenomenon that injecting CO2 into a methane hydrate will release the methane and the carbon dioxide will take its place in the ice. Supercritical CO2 has been successfully used as a production fluid for releasing the methane, but only limited experimentation has been done to try and use hydrates for large scale CO2 sequestration.
Methane hydrates had long been observed by offshore oil drillers who pierced through them to get to oil deposits and also because they have a tendency to form inside of pipes clogging them up. Research to quantify the extent of hydrates began in the 1980’s and scientists were surprised to see how widespread they were. Research into commercial development began in earnest around the year 2000 with programs in a number of countries. The US has been a leader in the research, but Asian countries, particularly Japan, China, India and South Korea have the most to gain because they lack conventional gas resources and pay the highest price for imported natural gas. Canada and the EU also have research programs.
Germany’s program is called SUGAR, and they have a pretty informative website. A fascinating 7 minute interview with their lead researcher Dr. Klaus Wallmann can be viewed here. Dr. Wallmann succinctly lays out the connections between climate change, the need for natural gas as clean energy, the potential to store CO2 in hydrates, and the geopolitical implications that these new resources could provide.
Japan has the most aggressive program to develop the gas hydrates since they have no indigenous fossil fuel resources and are completely dependent on imports of LNG for which they pay high prices. The Japanese have determined that there may be 100 years’ worth of gas supply in their territorial waters. They completed the most successful production test to date in 2013 where they produced gas continuously for a month. The Japanese have stated that they expect to have the technology ready by 2020 and will go into production after that.
An important test site was run in Alaska under a collaboration between the US NETL, ConocoPhillips and the Japanese. In this test at the Ignik Sukumi site onshore, a blend of supercritical CO2 and nitrogen was injected into the hydrate formation to produce the methane. Though short-lived the test was successful, a video on the project can be seen here.
Ray Boswell, Gas Hydrates Technology Lead for the US National Energy Technology Laboratory explained to me in an interview how certain geologic conditions have been identified that allow the methane to be produced. Specifically, the gas must be in a permeable sand rich sediment matrix that allows the gas to flow. Hydrates form nicely in the sand to begin with so concentrations are high, but also the water and gas can move through the sand. Researchers originally thought the hydrates were like solid blocks of ice that would need to be melted, but what they found was that 5% – 10% of the volume of material is actually flowing water. This mobile water can be drawn out using depressurization and provides space for the methane molecules to move to the well bore.
A big concern in producing the hydrates is that it could cause destabilization of the sea floor, subsidence is not uncommon in conventional oil and gas drilling and avoiding subsidence is a critical technical concern in hydrate technology development. One of the benefits in using CO2 as a production fluid is that it exchanges with the methane in the ice and works as a cement to maintain structural stability. One of the challenges in using CO2 it has a tendency to immediately form hydrates with the mobile water and interfere with the methane production. For this reason a blend of carbon dioxide and nitrogen was used in the Ignik Sukumi test to create the proper thermodynamic conditions for the methane to flow while maintaining stability of the reservoir.
The water that is drawn out of the well bore with the methane is low salinity, less saline than ocean water. The gas hydrates themselves are 99% methane, no gas cleanup is needed. This is an important contrast to conventional and shale gas drilling where the produced water is extremely saline and contaminated and must be disposed of via injection wells of other means. Conventional gas drilling also yields natural gas liquids like propane and butane and contaminants like hydrogen sulfide.
Drilling methane hydrates is much cleaner than conventional gas drilling or hydraulic fracturing. First of all, there are no neighbors to be bothered when working offshore or in remote arctic regions. Secondly, there is no dirty water to be disposed of, and unlike hydrofracking no harmful chemicals are needed, the only chemicals used are carbon dioxide and nitrogen so there is no risk of environmental contamination.
Experts believe that a combination of techniques will be used to produce the methane including depressurization, chemical injection and heating. Depressurization simply requires using vacuum pumps, and the supercritical CO2 can be heated for temperature management. There is some art as well as science in managing these techniques and so far the field experience is limited to only four experimental production tests. Much more experience is needed before there is solid understanding of how the gas will flow over time and what kind of production rates can be sustained. But researchers are confident that the technology works and that there are no technical showstoppers that will prevent production from going forward. The economics still remain to be determined, and while it is unlikely that the hydrates will compete with cheap shale gas in the US in the near term, countries like Japan that rely on expensive LNG imports can afford to move forward aggressively.
Commercial production of methane hydrates could be a complete game changer in global energy markets. In the same way that hydrofracking for shale gas caught energy markets by surprise, methane hydrates will likely do so on an even bigger scale. The reason is that the resources are simply enormous and widely distributed around the world. Every continent has substantial hydrate deposits and that means that countries that have never had domestic gas resources before may soon find themselves players in a new gas revolution.
14 Comments on "Methane Hydrates are a Promising Energy Resource"
Plantagenet on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 6:31 pm
First, coal was the main source of powerl-then oil-now we see shale oil–soon we’ll be shifting to conventional and shale natural gas as the dominant fossil fuel– and finally we’ll tap methane hydrates.
Kenjamkov on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 7:21 pm
well we won’t need fossil fuel for heating at that point
Makati1 on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 7:37 pm
Insanity at it’s finest… Reminds me of an old movie where they capture a dangerous 60 foot high sea monster and take it into the heart of London because they “know” they can control it and make bundles of cash. A few men are killed in the process, but considered the cost of doing business. Then they find out that it has a 600 foot high momma that is looking for it and which proceeds to trash London in the process.
Momma and kid go their merry way back to the sea and London is in ruins. (Gorgo 1961)
Apneaman on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 8:00 pm
“research and development has been promising” They were saying the same thing when I was in junior high in the early 1980s. At least the hydrogen economy that is coming next year again has some company. Were saved!
HARM on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 8:05 pm
BAU grinding to a halt thanks to resource limits, overpopulation and over-consumption? Starting to re-think that “endless growth is really possible” paradigm?
Don’t question the Growth Genie! Instead, let’s all start burning the trillions of tons of methane that nature has conveniently sequestered at the bottom of the world’s oceans –just for us! What could possibly go wrong?
Davy on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 8:23 pm
Why don’t we utilize fusion in the hydrate process. That folks is a great idea and it may be our answer. Fusion and Hydrates what an unbeatable combination. I bet Goldman Sachs will have a commercial soon showing how they financed the whole thing. You remember the old Enron commercials. Why that came into my head I don’t know but it reminded me of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9uTEJVumc
Perk Earl on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 9:14 pm
The problems as I see them with this idea are;
1) how do they recover the methane deposits without disturbing the surrounding methane, that will release into the water, and if close enough to the surface exit into the atmosphere as unburned methane which is a much worse GHG than CO2?
2) It’s not like drilling down for oil in one spot, they have to keep moving. So how does this rig move, capture the methane and not release the stuff into the water/air?
3) Also it’s not a liquid but a solid, so how do they remove a solid and get it all. Let’s say they drop down some kind of Bell that sits on the bottom and captures whatever comes up through the bell, but when its moved to tap into new resources it leaves a circular area exposed that then starts releasing methane into the water at it’s periphery.
It seems like an interesting idea on the surface, i.e. capturing methane because it’s on the continental divides in large amounts, but it’s spread over huge areas. There really is no way to recover the methane and not disturb/release millions of tons of it as a by product of that process. It’s an uneven, unpredictable terrain with rocks, corral, plant life, in corrosive salt water to boot.
Didn’t the Japanese already try this?
Dave Thompson on Tue, 17th Feb 2015 10:21 pm
This is what the methane hydrates will offer humanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQDVr1eMLK8
JuanP on Wed, 18th Feb 2015 10:47 am
I couldn’t be bothered to read the article, but the title “Methane Hydrates are a Promising Energy Resource” cracked a smile on my grumpy face and led to me LOL.
Bob Owens on Wed, 18th Feb 2015 1:38 pm
Given our current fossil burn rate we will quite easily destroy the planet. We don’t need no stinking Hydrates! Seriously, we know how to build and deploy solar. So why not solar? What are we thinking? No, we are going to go drilling into the deepest parts of the ocean, inject CO2 and nitrogen, get gas to burn. That sounds so easy!
J-Gav on Wed, 18th Feb 2015 1:58 pm
Trying to extract clathrates from ocean bottoms would only be one more brick in the wall for hastening the decline of humanity on Earth. An obscene waste of time, money and mental energy.
dubya on Wed, 18th Feb 2015 4:12 pm
Planet, you got in there first again but you forgot to mention the oil glut…
Newfie on Wed, 18th Feb 2015 7:02 pm
Burn baby, burn. Then… Fry baby, fry. The planet will be cooked to a blackened crisp after burn all those hydrocarbons.
energyskeptic on Sat, 21st Feb 2015 7:43 pm
Why we aren’t mining methane hydrates now. Or ever.
Posted on April 28, 2014 by
by Alice Friedemann http://www.energyskeptic.com
http://energyskeptic.com/2014/methane-hydrate-not-gonna-happen/
Methane hydrates are methane gas and water that exist where pressures are high or temperatures low enough.
The United States Geological Survey estimates the total energy content of natural gas in methane hydrates is greater than all of the known oil, coal, and gas deposits in the world.
But that’s a wild ass guess since we can’t measure this resource, for reasons such as coring equipment that can’t handle the expansion of the gas hydrate as it’s brought to the surface. And if you do work around this problem, there’s tremendous variability within the same area (Riedel). Since less than 1% of is potentially extractable, there’s no point in throwing around large numbers and getting the energy illiterate excited.
According to petroleum engineer Jean Laherrère, no way do methane hydrates dwarf fossil fuels. “Most hydrates are located in the first 600 meters of recent oceanic sediments at an average water depth of 500 meters or more, which represents just a few million years. Fossil fuel sediments were formed over a billion years and are much thicker — typically over 6,000 meters (Laherrère).
So here it is 2014, with no commercially produced gas hydrate, despite 30 years of research at hundreds of universities, government agencies, and energy companies in the United States, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Norway, South Korea, China, and Russia.
Japan alone has spent about $700 million on methane-hydrate R&D over the past decade (Mann) and gotten $16,000 worth of natural gas out of it (Nelder). I think this reflects the likely EROI of methane hydrates — .0000228 (16000/700,000,000, and yes, I know money and EROI aren’t the same). But EROI doesn’t capture the insanity as understandably as money does. Basically, for every $43,750 you spend, you get $1 back ($700,000,000 / $16,000).
Of course, it’s all theoretical. Maybe you get $500 or $5,000 back. Who knows? There is no commercial production now or in the foreseeable future. And we’ve tried all kinds of thermal techniques to unleash it — hot brine injection, steam injection, cyclic steam, fire flooding, and electromagnetic heating — all of them too inefficient and expensive to scale up to a commercial project (DOE 2009).
Even if we found a way to get some of them, they’re so thin and dispersed that the most we could hiope for is about 100 Tcfg (trillion cubic feet of gas), about 1% of the present gas URR, despite the fact that the total resources are orders of magnitude higher (Boswell).
1) Gas hydrates are cotton candy crystals mainly found in dispersed, deeply buried impermeable marine shale.
In Figure 2 below, methane hydrates (yellow) in porous sands are the only resource with any chance of being exploited — a very small fraction of the overall methane hydrate resource. Most methane hydrates are locked up in marine shales (gray) where they’ll probably remain forever because:
The average concentrations are extremely low, about .9 to 1.5% by volume, even in the less than 1% of highly porous sediments where there’s any chance of extracting them
Marine shales are impermeable, very deep, widely dispersed, with very low concentrations of methane hydrate (Moridis et al., 2008).
Clathrates are far from oil and gas infrastructure, which you must use to get the methane hydrates stored and delivered
The infrastructure, technology, and equipment to extract gas hydrates hasn’t been invented yet
The energy required to get the methane hydrate out has negative Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). It takes too much energy to heat them in order to release them plus break the bonds between the hydrates’ water molecules.
Inhibitor injection requires significant quantities of fairly expensive chemicals
Source: Boswell, Ray, et al. 14 Sep 2010. Current perspectives on gas hydrate resources. Energy Environ. Sci., 2011,4, 1206-1215
2) Methane Hydrates are Explosive Cotton Candy
Because as temperature rises or pressure goes down when you bring these ice cubes to the surface, the gas hydrates expand to 164 times their original size. Though most are the size of sugar grains mixed in with other sediments.
methane hydrate real cotton candy
Methane hydrates bubbling up to the surface
3) How do you store and get these giant gas bubbles to market?
If you could keep the gas hydrates small, crystalline, and pacified, there would still be that niggling worry you might offend them into their 164-fold fury. So it’s best to let that happen — but now where are you going to store all this gas and how will you deliver it?
You’d have to use oil and gas infrastructure in the Arctic and other questionable places where ownership isn’t settled and potentially create geopolitical tensions.
And imagine how Exxon will feel about that! Their oil rigs are already dodging icebergs. Oil companies avoid drilling through methane hydrates because they can fracture and disrupt bottom sediments, wrecking the wellbore, pipelines, rig supports, and potentially take out a billion dollar offshore platform as well as other oil and gas production equipment and undersea communication cables.
4) The Mining of Gas Hydrates can cause Landslides…
Eastman states that normally, the pressure of hundreds of meters of water above keeps the frozen methane stable. But heat flowing from oil drilling and pipelines has the potential to slowly destabilize it, with possibly disastrous results: melting hydrate might trigger underwater landslides as it decomposes and the substrate becomes lubricated…
5) Which can Trigger Tsunamis
Landslides can create tsunamis that migh result in fatalities, long term health effects, and destruction of property and infrastructure.
6) Methane Hydrates are a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide
Climate scientists like James E. Hansen worry that methane hydrates in permafrost may be released due to global warming, unleashing powerful feedback loops that could cause uncontrollable runaway climate change.
Scientists believe that sudden, massive releases of methane hydrates may have led to mass extinction events in the past.
Considering that the amount of methane onshore and offshore could be 3,000 times as much as in the atmosphere, it ought to be studied a bit more before proceeding, don’t you think? (Whiteman 2013, Kvenvolden 1999).
7) Ecological Destruction
They’re dispersed across vast areas at considerable depths, which makes them very ecologically destructive to mine, since you have to sift through millions of cubic yards of silt to get a few chunks of hydrate.
8) Toxic Waste
The current state of technology uses existing oil drilling techniques, which generate wastes including produced formation water (PFW), drilling fluid chemicals, oil and water-based drilling muds and cuttings, crude oil from extraction processes and fuel/diesel from ships and equipment (Holdway 2002).
9) EROI
There are only two studies on EROI, both by Callarotti, and he looks only at the heat energy used to free the clathrates up, and it’s published in a journal called Sustainability that would better be named Gullibility when it comes to the topic of energy which is not their specialty. He comes up with an EROI of 4/3 to 5/3 using just that one parameter. Callarotti knows this is a dishonest figure because he says “If one were to consider the energy required for the construction of the heaters, the pipes, and the pipe and the installation process, the total EROI would be even less.”
Is he kidding? What about the energy used to mine and crush the ore to get the metals to build the pipelines, drilling, dredging and sifting through the sediment equipment, methane hydrate processing plant, the vessel and the diesel burned to get to the remote (arctic) location, and so on.
Conclusion
You don’t have to be a scientist to see how difficult the problem is:
Somehow you’ve got to capture the energy in thousands of square miles of exploding grains of sugar that erupt into a gas 164 times their size.
There are huge deposits of natural gas that are easier to get at and far more valuable that aren’t being exploited because they’re stranded (not near pipeline infrastructure), so who’s going to invest in a resource of much lower quality at the bottom of the pyramid with such dismal prospects?
We can’t even drill for oil in most of the Arctic (Patzek) which is where a lot of the methane hydrates are, and that infrastructure has to be there to even think of trying to get at the methane hydrates.
Most of the hydrates are in a thin film on the deep ocean floor. Are you going to build a thousand square mile blanket to trap the bubbles like a school of fish? Or use expensive fracking & coalbed methane techniques?
Permafrost gas hydrate is so shallow there’s not enough pressure to get it to flow fast enough to be worth mining
Despite all the happy talk that says we can meet these challenges by 2025 if only there were more funding, we’re out of time.
It’s highly unlikely that Methane Hydrates will ever fuel the diesel engines that do the actual work of civilization, all of them screaming
References
Arango, S. O. May 7, 2013. Canada drops out of race to tap methane hydrates Funding ended for research into how to exploit world’s largest fossil energy resource. CBC News
Benton, Michael J. 2003. When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. Thames & Hudson.
BBC. 5 December 2002. The Day The Earth Nearly Died. Permian-Triassic Extinction Event
Boswell, R. 2009. Is gas hydrate energy within reach? Science.
Callarotti, R. C. 2011. Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for the Electrical Heating of Methane Hydrate Reservoirs. sustainability 2011, 3.
Collett T. S. April 19-23, 2002. “Detailed analysis of gas hydrate induced drilling and production hazards,” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Gas Hydrates, Yokohama, Japan.
Carrington, Damian. 23 Nov 1999. Fossil fuel revolution begins.
DOE 2009. U.S. Department of Energy. 2009. International Energy Outlook 2009
Eastman, Q. 2004. Energy Saviour? Or Impending Disaster? Science Notes.
Holdway, D. A. 2002. The acute and chronic effects of wastes associated with offshore oil and gas production on temperate and tropical marine ecological processes. Marine Pollution Bulletin, Vol 44: 185-203.
Jayasinghe, A.G. 2007. Gas hydrate dissociation under undrained unloading conditions. P. 61 in Submarine Mass Movements and Their Consequences. Vol. IGCP-511. UNESCO.
Kaneshiro-Pineiro, M. et al. Dec 4, 2009. Report on the Science, Issues, Policy, and Law of Gas Hydrates as an Alternative Energy Source. East Carolina University. Coastal Resources Management Program.
Kvenvolden, K.A. 1999. Potential effects of gas hydrate on human welfare. Proceedings in the National Academy of Science. USA. 96: 3420 – 3426.
Laherrère, Jean. July 17, 2009. Update on US Gulf of Mexico: Methane Hydrates. theoildrum europe.
Mann, C. C. May 2013. What If We Never Run Out of Oil? New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare. The Atlantic.
Moridis, George. 2006. “Geomechanical implications of thermal stresses on hydrate-bearing sediments,” Fire in the Ice, Methane Hydrate R&D Program Newsletter.
Moridis, G.J., et al. 2008. Toward production from gas hydrates: Current status, assessment of resources, and simulation-based evaluation of technology and potential. Paper SPE 114163.Presented at the SPE Unconventional Reservoirs Conference, Keystone, Colo., February 10–12, 2008.
Nelder, C. 2013. Are Methane Hydrates Really Going to Change Geopolitics? The Atlantic.
Office of Naval Research. 5 Nov 2002. Fiery Ice From The Sea: A New World Energy Source?
NAS 2009. America’s Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. 2009. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, National Academy of Engineering.
Patzek, Tad. 29 Dec 2012. Oil in the Arctic. LifeItself blog.
Riedel M and the Expedition 311 Scientists. 2006. Proceedings of the IODP, 311: Washington, DC (Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Management International, Inc).
Whiteman, G. et al. 25 July 2013. Vast costs of Arctic change. Nature, 499, 401-3.