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. 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. 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.