NATURAL GAS HYDRATE IN OCEANIC AND PERMAFROST ENVIRONMENTS

Coastal Systems and Continental Margins

VOLUMES

Series Editor

Bila! U. Haq

Editorial Advisory Board

M. Collins, Dept. of Oceanography, University of Southampton, U.K. D. Eisma, Emeritus Professor, Utrecht University and Netherlands Institute for Sea Research,

Texel, The Netherlands

K.E. Louden, Dept. of Oceanography, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada J.D. Milliman, School of Marine Science, The College of William & Mary, Gloucester Point, VA,

U.S.A. H.W. Posamentier, Anadarko Canada Corporatioll, Calgary, AB, Canada

A. Watts, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, U.K.

Natural Gas Hydrate In Oceanic and Permafrost Environments

Edited by

Michael D. Max Marine Desalination Systems, L.L.c. Suite 461, 1120 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC, U.S.A.

~.

" SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A c.1.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4020-1362-1 ISBN 978-94-011-4387-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-4387-5

Cover Illustration Photo of burning methane hydrate laboratory samples by 1. Pinkston & L. Stern, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA, U.S.A.

Printed on acid-free paper

© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 2003 AII Rights Reserved for chapters 6, 24 and 26 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic Of mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informafion storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

This book is dedicated to Rodney Malone, a friend to hydrate enthusiasts and science, who established the first National Gas Hydrate Research Program.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: Michael D. Max. xi

Part 1. Hydrate as a Material and its Discovery

Chapter 1. Introduction, Physical Properties, and Natural Occurrences of Hydrate. Robert E. Pellenbarg. & Michael D. Max. 1

Chapter 2. Natural Gas Hydrate: Introduction and History of Discovery. Keith A. Kvenvolden. 9

Part 2. Physical Character of Natural Gas Hydrate

Chapter 3. Practical Physical Chemistry and Emperical Predictions of Methane Hydrate Stability. Edward T. Peltzer & Peter G. Brewer. 17

Chapter 4. Thermal State of the Gas Hydrate Reservoir. Carolyn Ruppel. 29

Part 3. Oceanic and Permafrost-Related Natural Gas Hydrate

Chapter 5. Permafrost-Associated Gas Hydrate. Timothy S. Collett & Scott R. Dallimore. 43

Chapter 6. Oceanic Gas Hydrate. William P. Dillon & Michael D. Max. 61

Part 4. Source of Methane and its Migration

Chapter 7. The Role of Methane Hydrate in Ocean Carbon Chemistry and Biochemical Cycling. Richard B. Coffin. Kenneth S. Grabowski & Jeffrey P. Chanton 77

Chapter 8. Deep Biosphere: Source of Methane for Oceanic Hydrate Peter Wellsbury & R. John Parkes. 91

Chapter 9. Movement and Accumulation of Methane in Marine Sediments: Relation to Gas Hydrate Systems. M. Ben Clennell. Alan Judd & Martin Hovland 105

Part 5. Major Hydrate-related Issues

Chapter 10. Natural Gas Hydrate as a Potential Energy Resource. Timothy S. Collett. 123

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Chapter 11. Climate Impact of Natural Gas Hydrate. Bilal U. Haq. 137

Chapter 12. Potential Role of Gas Hydrate Decomposition in Generating Submarine Slope Failures. Charles K. Paull, William Ussler III. & William P. Dillon. 149

Part 6. Distribution of Natural Gas Hydrate

Chapter 13. U.S. Atlantic Continental Margin; the Best-Known Gas Hydrate Locality. William P. Dillon & Michael D. Max.

Chapter 14. Gas Hydrate in the Arctic and Northern North Atlantic Oceans. Michael D. Max, Jiirgen Mienert,

157

Karin Andreassen, & Christian Berndt 171

Chapter 15. Cascadia Margin, Northeast Pacific Ocean: Hydrate. Distribution from Geophysical Investigations. George D. Spence, Roy D. Hyndman N. Ross Chapman, Michael Riedel, Nigel Edwards & Jian Yuan. 183

Chapter 16. The Occurrence ofBSRs on the Antarctic Margin. Emanuele Lodolo & Angelo Camerlenghi.

Chapter 17. Gas Hydrate Potential of the Indian Sector of the NE

199

Arabian Sea and Northern Indian Ocean. Michael D. Max. 213

Chapter 18. Hydrate as a Future Energy Resource for Japan. Michael D. Max. 225

Chapter 19. A Note on Gas Hydrate in the Northern Sector of the South China Sea. Sheila. McDonnell & Michael Czarnecki. 239

Part 7. How we see Hydrate

Chapter 20. Introduction to Physical Properties and Elasticity Models. Jack Dvorkin, Michael B. Helgerud, William F. Waite,

Stephen H. Kirby and Amos Nur.

Chapter 21. Geophysical Sensing and Hydrate. Peter R. Miles.

Chapter 22. Seismic Methods for Detecting and Quantifying Marine Methane HydratelFree Gas Reservoirs Ingo A. Pecher & W. Steven Holbrook.

245

261

275

Chapter 23. Ground truth: In-Situ Properties of Hydrate David S. Goldberg, Timothy S. Collett & Roy D. Hyndman.

Part 8. Laboratory Studies of Gas Hydrates

Chapter 24. GHASTLI - Detennining Physical Properties of Sediment Containing Natural and Laboratory-Fonned Gas Hydrate.

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295

William J. Winters, William P. Dillon, Ingo A. Pecher & David H. Mason 311

Chapter 25. Laboratory synthesis of pure methane hydrate suitable for measurement of physical properties and decomposition behavior. Laura Stern, Steven H. Kirby, William B. Durham, Susan Circone, & William F. Waite. 323

Part 9. The Promise of Hydrate

Chapter 26. Economic Perspective of Methane from Hydrate Klaas J. Bil.

Chapter 27. Hydrate Resource, Methane Fuel, and a Gas-Based Economy? Michael D. Max.

Additional Chapter Added for Second Printing

Chapter 28. Sea Floor Venting and Gas Hydrate Accumulation. Valery A. Soloviev & Leonid L. Mazurenko

Editor's note: This chapter should be read with Part 4.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

SELECTED REFERENCES

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

349

361

AI-A-8

371

375

411

Preface

1. THE BEGINNINGS OF HYDRATE RESEARCH Until very recently, our understanding of hydrate in the natural environment and its impact on seafloor stability, its importance as a sequester of methane, and its potential as an important mechanism in the Earth's climate change system, was masked by our lack of appreciation of the vastness of the hydrate resource. Only a few publications on naturally occurring hydrate existed prior to 1975. The first published reference to oceanic gas hydrate (Bryan and Markl, 1966) and the first publication in the scientific literature (Stoll, et a1., 1971) show how recently it has been since the topic of naturally occurring hydrate has been raised.

Recently, however, the number of hydrate publications has increased substantially, reflecting increased research into hydrate topics and the initiation of funding to support the researchers. Awareness of the existence of naturally occurring gas hydrate now has spread beyond the few scientific enthusiasts who pursued knowledge about the elusive hydrate because of simple interest and lurking suspicions that hydrate would prove to be an important topic.

The first national conference on gas hydrate in the U.S. was held as recently as April, 1991 at the U.S. National Center of the U.s. Geological Survey in Reston Virginia (Max et al., 1991). The meeting was co-hosted by the U.s. Geological Survey, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Two subsequent U.S. national meetings on the topic of gas hydrate have been held and a number of international scientific meetings also have been held; principally a major meeting in Ghent, Belgium in June, 1996 (Henriet and Meinert, 1997).

The first hydrate initiative conceived of as a broad national hydrate research program that had as its main practical aim the economic extraction of methane from hydrate, was established and funded by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (Morgantown WV) of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1982. A broad range of very important hydrate data was produced under the direction of the Program Manager, Rodney Malone. For the first time, the interrelated nature of various hydrate issues yielded data and new modeling which have proved to be the starting point of other national hydrate research programs.

In 1995, the government of Japan (Chapter 18) established a five-year hydrate research program. This program was well funded and involved assessment of Japanese hydrate resources and engineering and experimental work dealing with production issues (Chapter 5). A second five year hydrate

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research program is now underway (Chapter 18). This successor program is organized differently, with greater weight being given to gas distribution infrastructure implications and to industrial concerns associated with an anticipated indigenous supply of methane from hydrates in the Japanese sea area.

In 1996, the government of India (Chapter 17) also established a national gas hydrate research program under the direction of the Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL). The initial assessment included a very large sea area and sought out international consultants to review and reprocess existing data. Following recent changes in the Indian government, the Indian hydrate program was reorganized in 1999 .

As more information became available, the early estimates of very large volumes of hydrate have become generally confirmed (Chapters 2, 10), interest has also grown in the u.s. On September 30, 1997, the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology recommended that hydrate may constitute a significant part of the U.S. national energy base and that a u.S. gas hydrate research program be established. (PCAST, 1997). On July 17, 1998, Senate bill S.1418, "To promote the research, identification, assessment, exploration, and development of methane hydrate resources and for other purposes", was passed in the u.S. Senate and completed hearings on September IS, 1998 before being sent to the House of Representatives. The final version of the 'Methane Hydrate Research and Development Act of 2000' has now (* April, 2000) been passed by the u.S. House of Representatives and after its passing by the U.S. Senate will be signed into law by the President. This act will empower the u.S. Department of Energy, working closely with the Department of Defense through the Secretary of the Navy, and the u .S. Geological Survey, and NOAA, to establish and implement a new national hydrate research program.

Recent interest in hydrate also has developed in the European Union, and individually some of its member countries, the Republic of South Korea, China (Ministry of Geology and Mineral Resources) and Taiwan, amongst others. The primary interest is the potential of hydrate to supply large quantities of methane to commercial energy markets in this century and beyond. However, other aspects of hydrate (Part 5, Chapters 10, II & 12, etc.) are also important.

2. ORGANIZATION OF TillS BOOK Methane hydrate is the dominant species of naturally occurring gas hydrate on Earth. It appears to occur in huge quantities in the seafloor and in permafrost regions, but to date the methane resource in hydrate has only begun to be quantified and assessed. We are only beginning to understand how hydrate functions in the methane-carbon dioxide system of the biosphere and how it interacts with natural changes of pressure and temperature to shape the seafloor. The hydrate system is an important boundary mechanism between geological and ocean-atmosphere components of the Earth's biosphere.

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The physical chemistry of methane and other gas hydrates is well dealt with in other books, particularly Dendy Sloan's Clathrate Hydrates of Natural Gases (Sloan, 1998). A number of areas in which hydrate has been identified, such as the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean Sea, some areas in the central Pacific, the Barents Sea, and the Bering Sea are not considered individually. This book does not intend to be a compendium of all hydrate localities but rather to introduce hydrate as a topic and to provide a broad introduction to naturally occurring methane hydrate.

This book mainly summarizes the present state of methane hydrate science rather than trying to present new results, as would be the case in a special publication of scientific papers. Nonetheless, contributors have included a number of new observations and insights, and in some cases, new data.

The form of the book is a series of chapters from contributors who are experts in hydrate science. Each contributor or group of contributors has been active in hydrate research in their own right. The contributors to this book have authored a significant proportion of existing publications in the field of gas hydrates.

Nine parts or topic areas relating to hydrate have been identified in an attempt to systematize description and explanation of the still imperfectly known science of gas hydrate:

Part 1. Hydrate as a material and its discovery. Methane hydrate is described as part of a the larger chemical system of container compounds. The salient features of methane hydrate as a naturally occurring material are outlined as is the history its history of discovery.

Part 2. Physical character of Natural Gas Hydrate. The physical chemistry and thermal state of methane hydrate in the natural environment are summarized.

Part 3. Oceanic and Permafrost-Related natural Gas Hydrate. Methane hydrate occurs in two general environments; in near surface sediments in permafrost regions (including now-flooded continental shelves containing permafrost hydrate), and in a deep water marine environment where it has been recognized mainly on upper and middle water depth continental slopes. This oceanic hydrate contains up to 95% of all naturally occurring hydrate. This part describes and contrasts hydrate in these different environments.

Part 4. Source of methane and its migration. The sources of methane, its migration and mechanisms of concentration within the seafloor are described. The functioning of the hydrate system, which alternatively sequesters and releases methane in response to environmental changes may affect a wide range of geobiological, chemical, oceanographic, and climatological issues.

Part 5. Major Hydrate-related Issues Hydrate appears to be important to three main issue-areas, I. Their potential as a source of combustible energy, 2. Their impact upon global climate, and 3. Their impact upon seafloor stability and continental margin geological processes. Each of

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these is sufficiently important to justifY close study of hydrate and the methane hydrate system.

Part 6. Some Examples of Natural Gas Hydrate Localities. The distribution of hydrate is as yet imperfectly known. The best known oceanic hydrate locations are described here. These locations may not prove to be the most important or the best known in relatively few years.

Mechanisms for concentrating methane and hydrate may differ substantially on active (collisional) and passive continental margins. In collisional margins sediment is thickened in accretionary complexes in which concentration of methane in hydrate may be facilitated not only by the prevalence of gas and fluid migration pathways caused by stresses and strain mechanisms, but by tectonic elevation of hydrate. In contrast, passive margins in which hydrate is found are characterized by tensional structures associated with establishment of a new plate margins and by successively younger being deposited primarily in sediment drapes without tectonism.

A number of examples of both active and passive margin hydrate deposits are described.

Part 7. How we see hydrate. Reflection and refraction seismic analysis is the principal tool for identifYing the presence of hydrate (Chapter 15 for a brief description of electrical methods). The only sure inspection and quantification tool is drilling, direct sampling, and sample analysis. Interpretation of wide area survey methods such as seismics, must be controlled by direct observation.

Part 8. Laboratory studies of gas hydrates. Sea-going marine research is expensive. Considerable information can be derived from artificial hydrate formed in laboratory apparatus. Testing of various hydrate properties should result in data that will allow remote survey data, such as multi-channel seismics to be calibrated so that the volume and manner of hydrate formation can be deduced without extensive drilling. This part deals with two hydrate fabrication laboratories and their experimental methods and results.

Part 9. The Promise of Hydrate. Two aspects of the future of hydrate are presented here. The basis for carrying out hydrate research and learning to extract methane from hydrate is contrasted with a commercial analysis of the likelihood and timing of hydrate exploitation.

Acknowledgements. I would like to thank Rodney Malone and Hugh Guthrie of the Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC), Morgantown WV (U.S. Department of Energy), colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory, and hydrate enthusiasts elsewhere. I especially thank the contributors to this book.

Michael D. Max Marine Desalination Systems, L.L.c. Suite 461, 1120 Connecticut Ave. NW. Washington DC, U.S.A.