Hearing Of The House Committee On Natural Resources - Unconventional Fuels II: The Promise Of Methane Hydrates

Statement

Good morning, and welcome to the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee's second hearing on unconventional fuels. Our first hearing in this hearing in this series, on shale gas, dealt with a resource that, while still technically considered unconventional, has already become a major component of our nation's domestic fuel supply. Today's hearing is on methane hydrates, a truly unconventional fuel source, albeit one that has the potential to make a massive impact in the future.
Methane hydrates can be thought of as natural gas frozen in ice. They have a structure where water molecules form a cage around individual molecules of methane, essentially trapping them in a solid state. Because the methane molecules are held together much closer than they would be if they were a free gas, one cubic foot of methane hydrate can release over 160 cubic feet of methane gas.

Originally these substances were thought to just be a laboratory curiosity or a pipeline nuisance. But since they were discovered in nature nearly 50 years ago, they have become viewed as a significant hazard for offshore oil and gas drillers, a potential major player in global climate change, and, most importantly for the purposes of this hearing, possibly the largest source of fossil fuel in the entire world. Estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey peg the amount of gas in hydrate form in the United States to be over 200,000 trillion cubic feet. That sounds large by itself, but is even more impressive when the total amount of conventional natural gas in the United States is estimated to be around 1,700 trillion cubic feet. And in 2008, the nation used about 23 trillion cubic feet. So, in theory, we might have almost 8,500 years worth of natural gas locked up beneath our feet as hydrates.

However, the total resource figure tells us nothing about how much natural gas we would actually be able to get out of these hydrates, which will be highly limited because of economic and technological factors. And the resource estimates themselves are highly uncertain. The Department of Energy and the U.S. Geological Survey, both of whom are here today, have been working for decades to try to answer the questions: How much gas hydrate do we really have? Where is it? And can we get to it in a way that will help provide a new robust source of domestically produced natural gas for this nation.

We do have a good general sense for where methane hydrates are - we know they exist in Arctic regions, beneath permafrost, and also offshore beneath the seabed. These offshore hydrates have been discovered off the coasts of South Carolina and Oregon, and in the Gulf of Mexico. In both the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico, the indications are that natural gas can be produced from methane hydrates using traditional drilling technology. I understand there were some particularly promising results from the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, which we will hear more about in the testimony.
The situation now with methane hydrates might resemble how things looked for gas shales just a couple of decades ago. At that time, gas shales were seen as uneconomic and technologically inaccessible - they were truly an unconventional fuel whose time would be far in the future. Those barriers were overcome, and I believe that with continued research, the barriers for production of natural gas from hydrates will be overcome as well in the not-too-distant future. I am extremely optimistic about the promise of methane hydrates, and I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about how that promise might turn into reality.

I now recognize our ranking member, Mr. Lamborn, for his opening statement.

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