Rice Gas Hydrates Initiative
- PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
- Rice Gas Hydrates Initiative
Gas hydrates offer a vast, untapped source of energy, a key element in the global carbon balance and past global warming events, and a key problem for hydrocarbon transmission in deepwater oil and gas production. The Rice Gas Hydrates Initiative offers an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers focused on gas hydrate issues in each of these areas.
Under the proposed research, Rice will produce data and develop a model of hydrates accumulation and dissociation in porous sediment. This will both increase knowledge related to the global carbon cycle and also help companies locate hydrate accumulations (e.g. "sweet spots"), providing necessary data for the eventual production and transmission of natural gas from hydrates. Also, recognition of conditions responsible for excessive pore fluid pressure will help identify conditions that trigger the sudden release of methane through fracturing and/or fluidization of the sediment. This will be important to the safety of gas production from hydrates as well as better quantifying the conditions under which massive release of methane occurred in the geologic history.
The Rice Gas Hydrates Initiative will provide the forum for researchers from various specialties to come together and tackle this truly multi-disciplinary problem collectively by creating a structure where funds can be shared across disciplines. The Gas Hydrates Initiative will bring together experts from the interested fields of engineering, earth science, chemistry, biology, paleontology and oceanography to forge a deeper understanding of the environmental role and consequences and the energy potential of gas hydrates.
In November 2003, the Shell Center, the Baker Institute and EESI sponsored Fire in Ice: Implications for Energy Development and the Carbon Cycle? a workshop that provided a forum for researchers from various specialties to come together and discuss the potential advantages and barriers to collaborative, cross-disciplinary research on gas hydrates and to gain understanding of the gaps that exist in the current state of knowledge. The aim of the conference was to develop a broader consensus of the questions and scientific data and methodologies needed to model how hydrates form and operate in nature.
In Spring 2004, the Rice Gas Hydrates Initiative will hold its Inaugural Symposium, which will focus on the dynamics of gas hydrates and bring experts from the interested fields of engineering, earth science, chemistry and microbiology together with industry scientists, government policy-makers to forge a deeper understanding of the environmental role and energy potential of gas hydrates.
