Methane Hydrates: Major Energy Source for the Future or Wishful Thinking?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Methane hydrates are methane bearing, ice-like materials that occur in abundance in permafrost areas such as on the North Slope of Alaska and Canada and as well as in offshore continental margin environments throughout the world including the Gulf of Mexico and the East and West Coasts of the United States. Methane hydrate accumulations in the United States are currently estimated to be about 200,000 Tcf, which is enormous when compared to the conventional recoverable resource estimate of 2300 Tcf. On a worldwide basis, the estimate is 700,000 Tcf or about two times the total carbon in coal, oil and conventional gas in the world. The enormous size of this resource, if producible to any degree, has significant implications for U.S. and worldwide clean energy supplies and global environmental issues. Historically the petroleum industry's interests in methane hydrates have primarily been related to safety issues such as wellbore stability while drilling, seafloor stability, platform subsidence, and pipeline plugging. Many questions remain to be answered to determine if any of this potential energy resource is technically and economically viable to produce. Major technical hurdles include: 1) methods to find, characterize, and evaluate the resource; 2) technology to safely and economically produce natural gas from methane hydrate deposits; and 3) safety and seafloor stability issues related to drilling through gas hydrate accumulations to produce conventional oil and gas. The petroleum engineering profession currently deals with gas hydrates in drilling and production operations and will be key to solving the technical and economic problems that must be overcome for methane hydrates to be part of the future energy mix in the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".