Alaska News

Alaska's methane hydrates, the 'next shale gas'?

Industry and science have long known about methane hydrates, essentially natural gas that has been trapped beneath the ground in molecular lattices of frozen, pressurized water. Estimates vary, but the globe is thought to contain a massive abundance of methane hydrates, tens of thousands of trillion cubic feet estimated in the Arctic alone.

The only problem is that an economical method of recovering the trapped gas hasn't been found yet.

But according to POLITICO, a new research project on Alaska's North Slope, conducted jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and ConocoPhillips, and supported by Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp., aims to change that situation.

During this winter's field season, researchers will experiment with an alternative extraction method which uses reinjected CO2 to push out the methane while leaving the ice structure intact and sequestering the CO2.

The procedure has already shown promise in the laboratory, and the tests, which will run about a 100 days total and last until March, will result in the most extensive field data ever collected on a hydrate reservoir.

Read much more, here, or, for a shorter read, click here for the Houston Chronicle's report.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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