Progress in Global Gas Hydrate Development and Production as a New Energy Resource
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natural gas hydrates have been hailed as a new and promising unconventional alternative energy, especially as fossil fuels approach depletion, energy consumption soars, and fossil fuel prices rise, owing to their extensive distribution, abundance, and high fuel efficiency. Gas hydrate reservoirs are similar to a storage cupboard in the global carbon cycle, containing most of the world's methane and accounting for a third of Earth's mobile organic carbon. We investigated gas hydrate stability zone burial depths from the viewpoint of conditions associated with stable existence of gas hydrates, such as temperature, pressure, and heat flow, based on related data collected by the global drilling programs. Hydrate‐related areas are estimated using various biological, geochemical and geophysical tools. Based on a series of previous investigations, we cover the history and status of gas hydrate exploration in the USA, Japan, South Korea, India, Germany, the polar areas, and China. Then, we review the current techniques for hydrate exploration in a global scale. Additionally, we briefly review existing techniques for recovering methane from gas hydrates, including thermal stimulation, depressurization, chemical injection, and CH 4 –CO 2 exchange, as well as corresponding global field trials in Russia, Japan, United States, Canada and China. In particular, unlike diagenetic gas hydrates in coarse sandy sediments in Japan and gravel sediments in the United States and Canada, most gas hydrates in the northern South China Sea are non‐diagenetic and exist in fine‐grained sediments with a vein‐like morphology. Therefore, especially in terms of the offshore production test in gas hydrate reservoirs in the Shenhu area in the north slope of the South China Sea, Chinese scientists have proposed two unprecedented techniques that have been verified during the field trials: solid fluidization and formation fluid extraction. Herein, we introduce the two production techniques, as well as the so‐called “four‐in‐one” environmental monitoring system employed during the Shenhu production test. Methane is not currently commercially produced from gas hydrates anywhere in the world; therefore, the objective of field trials is to prove whether existing techniques could be applied as feasible and economic production methods for gas hydrates in deep‐water sediments and permafrost zones. Before achieving commercial methane recovery from gas hydrates, it should be necessary to measure the geologic properties of gas hydrate reservoirs to optimize and improve existing production techniques. Herein, we propose horizontal wells, multilateral wells, and cluster wells improved by the vertical and individual wells applied during existing field trials. It is noteworthy that relatively pure gas hydrates occur in seafloor mounds, within near‐surface sediments, and in gas migration conduits. Their extensive distribution, high saturation, and easy access mean that these types of gas hydrate may attract considerable attention from academia and industry in the future. Herein, we also review the occurrence and development of concentrated shallow hydrate accumulations and briefly introduce exploration and production techniques. In the closing section, we discuss future research needs, key issues, and major challenges related to gas hydrate exploration and production. We believe this review article provides insight on past, present, and future gas hydrate exploration and production to provide guidelines and stimulate new work into the field of gas hydrates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".