Release Date: December 15, 2000

MORGANTOWN, WV - The Department of Energy is bringing four of its national laboratories into its gas hydrates program to take on studies of the properties and production potential of this intriguing -- and likely immense -- source of natural gas.

The department's National Energy Technology Laboratory will oversee new projects at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both in California, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Hydrates are a cage-like lattice of ice, inside of which are trapped molecules of methane, the chief constituent of natural gas. Scientists know very little about the chemical, physical, and structural properties of gas hydrates. It is generally acknowledged, however, that the amount of methane in hydrates beneath the ocean floor and the Arctic tundra is greater than all other known sources of natural gas ? possibly 5,000 times more than the world's known conventional gas resources.

The Energy Department restarted its gas hydrate research program two years ago, hoping to capitalize on deepwater and Arctic drilling advances that have improved prospects for eventually locating and producing natural gas from hydrates. With the nation's demand for natural gas growing, the department is accelerating research that could reveal new information about hydrate occurrences in nature, and that could lead to technologies for detecting, quantifying and producing methane from these resources.

The following four proposals were chosen following a competition among the department's national laboratories:

• Brookhaven National Laboratory will study the chemical bonding and structure, thermodynamics and kinetics of gas hydrates using natural hydrate samples and synthetic hydrates to better understand the stability of hydrates themselves. A second study will combine two techniques to track methane hydrate formation, observe the rate at which methane hydrates are formed, and estimate the amount of methane in an average hydrate. In addition, perfluorocarbon tracers (PFTs), chemical markers used to track oil production, will be tested, and the best PFTs will be selected as markers to track methane production. Project cost: $75,000.

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will integrate geology, geophysics and gas reservoir simulation with enhanced numerical codes to produce geological models of four different gas hydrate deposits representing permafrost and marine environments. The models are designed to improve the understanding of gas hydrate behavior in porous sediments, and emphasize operations or strategies for maximum resource recovery. Project cost: $200,000.

• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will study the mechanical behavior of hydrates using synthetic hydrates and controlled mixtures of hydrates and sediment to simulate natural occurrences. The proposed research will be correlated to existing laboratory and sea floor measurements and computer models by measuring hydrate formation, dissociation and physical properties. The results will contribute to the study of sea floor stability and safety issues. Project cost: $120,000.

• Oak Ridge National Laboratory will use its Sea-floor Process Simulator (SPS) to simulate natural sea floor environments associated with gas hydrate occurrences. Activities will include evaluation of technologies to find hydrate deposits, determine their mass and energy flux, determine the effects of hydrates on sea floor stability and examine methane recovery through dynamic flow experiments using the SPS. The SPS vessel will also be used by the other national laboratories involved in this cooperative research effort with NETL. Project cost: $75,000.