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University of Texas Gets Money to Study New Energy Source in Gulf of Mexico

The university plans to use the funding to harvest and analyze core samples of methane hydrate from sandstone reservoirs thousands of feet under the Gulf - the first time the deposits have been retrieved from U.S. waters.

The University of Texas at Austin has won $58 million to investigate a potentially massive energy resource: methane trapped in ice-like crystals under the Gulf of Mexico and oceans around the world.

The Department of Energy is providing $41.2 million toward the grant, one of the largest government grants ever awarded to the university, with the rest coming from industry and research partners.

The university plans to use the funding to harvest and analyze core samples of methane hydrate from sandstone reservoirs thousands of feet under the Gulf - the first time the deposits have been retrieved from U.S. waters.

The methane hydrates, which are ice-like solids with gas molecules locked inside, are typically found in high-pressure, low-temperature environments. And while they are stable under those conditions, the lattice-like structures start to melt as soon as they are warmed or depressurized, causing the methane to bubble away.

Methane hydrate holds tremendous promise as an energy source - if researchers can figure out how to affordably and successfully extract the gas.

In the Gulf, where the UT team will be sampling, there are an estimated 7,000 trillion cubic feet of methane in sand-dominated reservoirs beneath the seafloor, more than 250 times the amount of natural gas consumed by the U.S. last year.

Peter Flemings, a geoscientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics who is leading the research, calls methane hydrate "fascinating'' partly because it could be implicated in climate change and landslides deep underwater. Its unique properties and the ways in which it forms also are not fully understood.

'Stuff is just weird'

"This stuff is just weird, in the sense that in geologic conditions, you can take methane and water and form this stuff like ice that has really distinct properties,'' Flemings said.

Those unique characteristics make researching methane hydrates especially challenging and mean that after Flemings and his colleagues identify potential locations and drill to reach the deposits, samples must be retrieved in a special pressurized metal container.

Carlos Santamarina, a leading methane hydrate expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is not involved in the UT project, likened the technique to "taking a specimen inside a pressure cooker from thousands of feet below sea level and bringing it to the surface.''

The method will allow Flemings and his team to keep the harvested methane hydrate deposits under the same pressure and at the same temperature whether they are in a lab onshore or 9,500 feet below the surface of the sea.

The natural pressure conditions could be anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 PSI, Flemings said, with temperatures ranging from 37 to 68 degrees.

Once the samples are harvested, researchers will shoot X-ray images, take chemical measurements and run physical experiments with the material.

"All of this is in a very complicated laboratory where these materials are kept at those downhole pressures,'' he said. "We'll deform the rock and send sound waves through the rock, all in an effort to understand the in-situ conditions.''

During the fourth year of research, studies could be conducted aboard a special research drillship operated through Texas A&M University and funded by an international consortium. UT plans on applying to use that drillship, which is outfitted with a sophisticated laboratory that would enable two shifts of scientists to manipulate methane hydrate samples, measuring stress and strain under their natural conditions.

Some of the potential sampling areas in the Gulf are far from shore, under 3,000 to 6,500 feet of water.

The UT project also includes researchers from Ohio State University, Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, the Consortium for Ocean Leadership and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Little need now?

Because the U.S. is now awash in gas harvested from dense rock formations, there may be little need to develop new resources now.

"At the current price of gas and given the extraordinary success of producing unconventionals in the U.S., methane hydrates are a resource that are a way out in the future,'' Flemings acknowledged.

But methane hydrates are located off the coasts of Japan, India, South Korea and other countries that do not boast a wealth of oil and gas resources on land. Learning to unlock methane from subterranean ice prisons could help those countries meet their own energy needs, Flemings said.

©2014 the Houston Chronicle