[Pages S12004-S12006]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

By Mr. AKAKA (for himself, Mr. Craig, and Ms. Landrieu):
S. 1418. A bill to promote the research, identification, assessment,
exploration, and development of methane hydrate resources, and for
other purposes; to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

the methane hydrate research and development act of 1997

Mr. AKAKA. Mr. President, on behalf of myself and Senators Craig and
Landrieu, I am introducing the Methane Hydrate Research and Development
Act of 1997.
Methane hydrate is a methane-bearing, ice-like substance that occurs
in abundance in marine sediments. It is a crystalline solid of methane
molecules surrounded by a structure of water molecules.
Methane hydrates are stable at moderately high pressures and low
temperatures and contain large quantities of methane. One unit volume
of methane hydrate contains more than 160 volumes of methane at
standard temperature and pressure.
Methane hydrates are found in deep ocean sediments. Significant
quantities are also found in the permafrost of Alaska, Canada, and
Siberia.
Despite their potential as an energy resource, methane hydrates have
not received the attention they deserve. We are only beginning to
understand the magnitude of this potential resource. The amount of
methane sequestered in gas hydrates is enormous. Worldwide estimates
range from 100,000 trillion cubic feet to 270 million trillion cubic
feet. Locations of known methane hydrate deposits within the Untied
States include the Arctic, the seabed adjacent to northern California,
the Gulf of Mexico, and the Eastern Seaboard.
A conservative estimate of deposits under U.S. jurisdiction is 2,700
trillion cubic feet to seven million trillion cubic feet of gas. A
recent U.S. Geological Survey analysis indicates the presence of over
500 trillion cubic feet of methane at the Black Ridge site off the
coast of Carolinas alone. When you consider that current U.S.
consumption is less than 25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per
year, you begin to appreciate the magnitude of this energy resource.
The U.S. energy outlook is perilous at best. Our dependence on
imported oil is steadily increasing. Soon we will import over 60
percent of the oil we consume. Air pollution is a persistent problem.
We are spending enormous resources to improve air quality. Global
climate change poses a looming challenge. With these concerns in mind,
it is easy to recognize the importance of methane hydrates.
Methane hydrates are a strategic resource because they contain huge
amounts of methane in a concentrated form. Extracted methane from
hydrates represents an extraordinarily large energy resource and
petrochemical feedstock. Methane is less polluting than other
hydrocarbons because of its higher hydrogen-to-carbon ratio. Given the
concerns about global climate change, a transition to methane as an
energy resource is an attractive solution.
The U.S. is not doing enough to explore this viable energy source.
Other countries, primarily Japan and India, have aggressive programs to
develop methane hydrates. Japan has launched an exploration project for
methane hydrates in its surrounding waters. The Japanese National Oil
Corporation is conducting a seismic survey off Hokkaido Island and will
drill test wells in two locations in 1999. Commercial production is
planned for 2010. About six trillion cubic meters of methane hydrates
can be found in the seabed near Japan. Recovery of one-tenth of this
reserve could yield about 100 years supply of natural gas for Japan.
As part of its plan to boost natural gas resources, the Oil Industry
Development Board of India has earmarked $56 million for a program of
methane hydrates research and development. We cannot be left behind
these and other nations in the race to develop this important energy
resource.
Science News recently published an article summarizing the hopes and
hazards associated with methane hydrates. Mr. President, I ask
unanimous consent that a copy of this article be printed in the Record.
This is an exciting area of research and of new knowledge. It has an
enormous payoff, not only for our energy security, but also for the
global environment.
My bill establishes a small research and development program with the
potential for major payback. It would direct the Department of Energy
to conduct research and development in collaboration with the Naval
Research Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey. The Secretary of
Energy would also consult with other Federal and State agencies,
industry, and academia. It directs the Department to conduct research
on, and identify, explore, assess, and develop methane hydrate
resources as a source of energy. It also directs the Department to
develop technologies needed to develop methane resources in an
environmentally sound manner. It provides for research to develop safe
means of transportation and storage of methane produced from methane
hydrates. To alleviate the concerns related to releases of methane, the
legislation directs the Department to undertake research to assess and
mitigate hydrate degassing, both natural and that associated with
commercial development. It requires the Department to develop
technologies to reduce the risk of drilling through the gas hydrates.
And finally, it provides for the training of scientists and engineers
that would be needed for this new and exciting field on endeavor.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be
printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

S. 1418

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ``Methane Hydrate Research and
Development Act of 1997''.

SEC. 2. DEFINITIONS.

In this Act:
(1) Contract.--The term ``contract'' means a procurement
contract within the meaning of 6303 of title 31, United
States Code.
(2) Cooperative agreement.--The term ``cooperative
agreement'' means a cooperative agreement within the meaning
of section 6305 of title 31, United States Code.

[[Page S12005]]

(3) Grant.--The term ``grant'' means a grant agreement
within the meaning of section 6304 of title 31, United States
Code.
(4) Methane hydrate.--The term ``methane hydrate'' means a
methane clathrate that--
(A) is in the form of a methane-water ice-like crystalline
material; and
(B) is stable and occurs naturally in deep-ocean and
permafrost areas.
(5) Secretary.--The term ``Secretary'' means the Secretary
of Energy.
(6) Secretary of Defense.--The term ``Secretary of
Defense'' means the Secretary of Defense, acting through the
Secretary of the Navy.
(7) Secretary of the Interior.--The term ``Secretary of the
Interior'' means the Secretary of the Interior, acting
through the Director of the United States Geological Survey.

SEC. 3. METHANE HYDRATE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM.

(a) In General.--
(1) Commencement of program.--Not later than 180 days after
the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary, in
consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary
of the Interior, shall commence a program of methane hydrate
research and development.
(2) Designations.--The Secretary, Secretary of Defense, and
Secretary of the Interior shall designate individuals to
implement this Act.
(3) Meetings.--The individuals designated under paragraph
(2) shall meet not less frequently than every 120 days to
review the progress of the program under paragraph (1) and
make recommendations on future activities.
(b) Grants, Contracts, and Cooperative Agreements.--
(1) Assistance and coordination.--The Secretary may award
grants or contracts to, or enter into cooperative agreements
with, universities and industrial enterprises to--
(A) conduct basic and applied research to identify,
explore, assess, and develop methane hydrate as a source of
energy;
(B) assist in developing technologies required for
efficient and environmentally sound development of methane
hydrate resources;
(C) undertake research programs to provide safe means of
transport and storage of methane produced from methane
hydrates;
(D) promote education and training in methane hydrate
resources research and resource development;
(E) conduct basic and applied research to assess and
mitigate the environmental impacts of hydrate degassing, both
natural and that associated with commercial development; and
(F) develop technologies to reduce the risks of drilling
through methane hydrates.
(2) Consultation.--The Secretary may establish an advisory
panel consisting of experts from industry, academia, and
Federal agencies to advise the Secretary on potential
applications of methane hydrate and assist in developing
recommendations and priorities for the methane hydrate
research and development program carried out under this
section.
(c) Limitations.--
(1) Administrative expenses.--Not more than 5 percent of
the amount made available to carry out this section for a
fiscal year may be used by the Secretary for expenses
associated with the administration of the program subsection
(a)(1).
(2) Construction costs.--None of the funds made available
to carry out this section may be used for the construction of
a new building or the acquisition, expansion, remodeling, or
alteration of an existing building (including site grading
and improvement and architect fees.)
(d) Responsibilities of the Secretary.--In carrying out
subsection (b)(1), the Secretary shall--
(1) facilitate and develop partnerships among government,
industry, and academia to research, identify, assess, and
explore methane hydrate resources;
(2) undertake programs to develop basic information
necessary for promoting long-term interest in methane hydrate
resources as an energy source;
(3) ensure that the data and information developed through
the program are accessible and widely disseminated as needed
and appropriate;
(4) promote cooperation among agencies that are developing
technologies that may hold promise for methane hydrate
resource development; and
(5) report annually to Congress on accomplishments under
this Act.

SEC. 4. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.

There are authorized to be appropriated such sums as are
necessary to carry out this Act.
____

[From the Science News, Vol. 150, Nov. 9, 1996]

The Mother Lode of Natural Gas

(By Richard McNastersky)

For kicks, oceanographer William P. Dillon likes to
surprise visitors to his lab by taking ordinary-looking ice
balls and setting them on fire.
``They're easy to light. You just put a match to them and
they will go,'' says Dillon, a researcher with the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) in Woods Hole, Mass.
If the truth be told, this is not typical ice. The prop in
Dillon's show is a curious and poorly known structure called
methane hydrate. Unlike ordinary water ice, methane hydrate
consists of single molecules of natural gas trapped within
crystalline cages formed by frozen water molecules. Although
chemists first discovered gas hydrates in the early part of
the 19th century, geoscientists have only recently started
documenting their existence in underground deposits and
exploring their importance as potential fuel.
Late last year a team of oceanographers conducted the most
in-depth investigation of methane hydrates to date by
drilling into an extensive accumulation beneath the seabed
off the coast of the southeastern United States. The results
of this research, which are now beginning to appear in the
scientific literature, seem to bolster extremely sketchy
estimates made years ago about the vastness of the hydrate
resource.
``It turns out there is a tremendous amount of gas down
there,'' says Charles Paull, a marine geologist at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leader of
the recent drilling expedition. ``It shores up the fact that
these are large reserves and makes it increasingly important
that they get assessed in terms of whether they are energy-
producing deposits or not.''
At the same time, scientists wonder whether this resource
also has a dark side. ``There have been extremely rapid
changes in climate in the past. Some think that these were
caused by methane released from methane hydrate,'' says
Dillon.
Despite their potential importance, methane hydrates have
evaded scientific scrutiny until now, largely because they
are extremely difficult to study. They exist only where high
pressures and low temperatures squeeze water and methane into
a solid form.
Most known deposits of methane hydrate lie below the
seafloor in regions that slope from the continents to the
deep ocean basins thousands of meters underwater. Marine
geologists have tentatively identified deposits off the
coasts of Costa Rica, New Jersey, Oregon, Japan, India, and
hundreds of other sites around the globe. Petroleum companies
have also encountered hydrates while drilling through Arctic
pernafrost in Siberia, Alaska, and Canada.
Like vampires, hydrates disintegrate quickly if pulled from
their dark lair. When researchers on the recent drilling
expedition hauled up cores of sediment from the ocean floor,
the drastic reduction in pressure caused much of the hydrate
to melt before it even reached the ship. Without unusual
precautions, any remaining hydrate fizzed away when the
scientists cut open the core.
``Gas hydrates have largely escaped traditional geologic
observation because gas hydrates and humans are sort of
incompatible. The gas hydrates decompose under the conditions
[in which] people traditionally analyze cores. Conversely,
humans have no experience in operating in the conditions
where gas hydrates are stable. We die under the conditions of
gas hydrate stability,'' says Paull.
Oceanographers first drilled through methane hydrates
unintentionally, on an expedition in 1970. Although that
encounter was uneventful, research drilling cruises purposely
avoided suspected hydrate deposits for 2 decades afterward,
fearing they might hit an overpressureized pocket of gas,
which could blast away the drilling equipment. Concerns over
pressurized gas gradually diminished, and mounting scientific
curiosity emboldened researchers to try boring through more
hydrate fields. Starting in 1992, the International Ocean
Drilling Program (ODP) intentionally breached hydrate
deposits several times without incident.
On the recent expedition, Paull and his colleagues drilled
at three sites along the Blake Ridge, a large, submerged
promontory 330 kilometers off the southeast coast of the
United States. Working in water depths of 2,800 meters, the
researchers penetrated 700 meters below the seafloor with
a hollow drill bit that cuts away a core of sediment the
diameter of a soda can.
The investigators had to take special precautions to
prevent losing methane-hydrate during the 10 minutes it too
to haul fresh sections of core up from the ocean bottom. At
various depths, they sealed small bits of core in pressurized
barrels, thereby containing the gas until the core reached
shipboard laboratories. These samples provided the first
direct measurements of how much methane-hydrate exists at
different depths beneath the seafloor.
``The amount of hydrate down there is much higher than has
previously been estimated says Paull. ``It was not uncommon
to go from 10 liters up to 30 liters of gas per liter of
sediment.''
The researchers also measured, for the first time, large
amounts of free gas trapped beneath the frozen hydra-
deposits. The volume of gas was far more than expected,
exceeding even the amount within the frozen layer, says
Paull.
Although the exact origin of hydrate remains unknown, Paull
and others suspect that bacteria within the sediment consume
rich organic material and generate methane gas. At a certain
depth beneath the seafloor, the low temperatures and high
pressures ensnare the gas within the frozen hydrate
structures. Methane below the hydrate layer remains in
gaseous form because the temperatures there are too high to
support freezing.
Conventional deposits of methane, a natural gas, form
through a different process, when seafloor sediments are
buried far deeper. Exposed to much higher temperatures, the
organic material the sediments simmers until it transforms
into petroleum and eventually methane.

[[Page S12006]]

Nearly a decade ago, several researchers independently
tried to estimate how much methane exists in hydrate
deposits. Because of the scarcity of direct hyro-measurements
at the time, the estimate rested on indirect seismic studies
which probe the ocean bottom sediments with blasts of sound
that reflect off hidden layers.
These studies suggested that global hydrate deposits
contain approximately 10,000 gigatons, or 10 tons, of carbon.
That number represents double the combined amount in all
reserves of coal, oil, and conventional natural gas.
The newly emerging evidence, supports these rough
approximations, says Gordon J. MacDonald, one of the
scientists who made the calculations in the 1980s. ``All
these estimates are quite uncertain. But it remains
abundantly clear that methane hydrates contain the largest
store of carbon that we know about that is underground,''
says MacDonald, who now directs the International Institute
for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.
In fact, hydrates may be more widespread than previously
thought. The recent ODP expedition found hydrates in regions
that lack the seismically reflective layers usually used to
identify potential deposits, the team reports in the Sept. 27
Science.
``Given their worldwide distribution and their very large
quantities, they make a very attractive energy source,
provided that one can bring the gas up at somewhere near
market price,'' MacDonald says. The cost of accessing
hydrates has served as a barrier in the past, but some
energy-hungry nations lacking conventional fossil fuels are
extremely interested in future use of hydrates.
Japan plans to drill exploratory wells in the next few
years, first on land in Alaska and then in Japanese waters.
The Japanese National Oil Company is currently negotiating
with the U.S. and Canadian governments to conduct
experimental drilling of hydrate deposits near Prudhoe Bay,
Alaska in early 1998. They hope to have more success than the
nations and commercial companies that tried to extract frozen
methane in Canada, Alaska and Siberia during the 1970s and
1980s.
In nature, methane hydrates are fickle molecules, liable to
melt whenever the pressure drops slightly or the temperature
creeps upward. Evidence of this instability pockmarks the
ocean floor along the Blake Ridge. Marine geologists have
identified numerous craters there that apparently formed when
hydrates melted, releasing methane gas.
``The Blake Ridge is a pressure cooker, over geological
time. The gas and fluids come up and blow thought the
sediments. We can see depressions 500 to 700 meters wide and
20 to 30 meters deep,'' says Dillon.
In other cases, melting at the base of the hydrate layer
has destabilized seafloor slopes, leading to massive
submarine landslides. Researchers have suggested hydrate
weakness as a factor behind landslides off Alaska, the U.S.
Atlantic coast, British Columbia, Norway, and Africa, says
Keith A. Kvenvolden of the USGS in Menlo Park, Calif.
Such inherent instability could spell problems for future
drilling platforms resting on top of hydrate-rich deposits.
If the collapses are large enough, they could also produce
the destructive waves called tsunamis that race across ocean
basins.
Hydrates may exert their greatest impact through their
indirect links to climate. Because methane is a powerful
greenhouse gas--about 10 times as strong as carbon dioxide--
massive melting of hydrates and the ensuing release of
methane gas could raise Earth's surface temperature.
James P. Kennett of the University of California, Santa
Barbara has recently discovered intriguing evidence
implicating methane hydrates as an instigator of climate
change. Sediments off the California coast show signs that
carbon isotopic ratios in the ocean shifted quite
dramatically and quickly at several times during the last
70,000 years. Because methane has a distinctive isotopic
fingerprint that matches the shifts, Kennett suggests that
large volumes of methane must have poured into the ocean at
these times.
In this theory, the methane came from hydrates that melted
when ocean waters warmed slightly. The liberation of so much
methane over a few decades would have caused widespread
warming that affected the entire globe. As supporting
evidence, Kennett notes that the ocean's isotopic shifts
indeed coincide with well-known Dansgaard-Oeschger episodes
when Earth's ice age climate went suddenly warm.
``Until now, [hydrates] haven't really entered into
discussions of climate change. They have been almost
completely ignored. Until the beginning of this year, I had
not even considered them. But I'm now convinced that they are
of great importance to the global environment and have been
for billions of years,'' says Kennett. He presented his
findings in September at a gas hydrate conference in Ghent,
Belgium.
Kvenvolden has proposed a different mechanism that might
have released hydrates at the end of the last ice age. As the
great blanket of continental ice melted at that time, global
sea levels swelled by more than 90 meters, submerging many
Arctic regions where hydrate layers exist. The relatively
warm ocean water would have melted the hydrates, unleashing
tremendous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, Kvenvolden
believes.
The same rationale could apply to the modern world. Sea
levels are currently rising slowly, at a rate of a few
centimeters per decade. Projections suggest that they will
rise even faster in the future because of the climatic
warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution. At the same time,
ocean temperatures are expected to creep upward.
``If you reason that hydrates were important in climate
change in the past, there is no reason they wouldn't be
important in the future,'' says Kvenvolden. Indeed, some
scientists speculate that melting methane hydrates could
greatly exacerbate global warming.
For now, though, Kvenvolden and others remain unsure
exactly what role hydrates have played in past climate
changes. Lacking this knowledge, they say it is impossible to
predict how hydrates will behave in the future.
A greater understanding of hydrates and their importance
will come as oceanographers tap deposits in other areas of
the world, testing whether the lessons learned on the Blake
Ridge apply elsewhere. Scientists are also creating synthetic
hydrates in the laboratory (SN:10/19/96, p. 252). By
squeezing methane and water in a pressurized apparatus,
Dillon and his colleagues can not only gauge how hydrates
weaken seafloor sediments but also improve seismic methods
for detecting hydrates.
When the experiments are over, the remaining synthetic
hydrates could have other uses. ``I hadn't really thought of
it before, but you could try cooking with them'' says Dillon,
``I wouldn't want to plan a major meal, but you could
probably scramble an egg on it.''
______