3.5.5. Methane Hydrate Research Efforts of METC’s In-House Organization

METC’s in-house research organization carried out a number of research efforts, independently and in concert with academic laboratories, designed to complement the work being conducted by the contractors listed above.

An important contribution of METC’s in-house methane hydrate research group (part of the Geoscience Research Branch) was the development of a number of techniques for forming methane hydrates in the laboratory (so-called “synthetic hydrates”), several of which are still used today.

The group also carried out tests on natural hydrates and made their results public; of the six laboratories that received samples of the Deep Sea Drilling Program’s massive hydrate core recovered in the Mid-Americas trench in 1982, METC was one of only two that actually made their laboratory results public.³

The hydrate modeling of Burshears and others working in METC’s modeling group was innovative at the time and METC attempted to verify it using laboratory experiments; an effort that was at least qualitatively successful. ⁴

The METC in-house hydrates group served a critical role in integrating and coordinating work among all the program participants.

Representatives also participated in two Gulf of Mexico hydrate recovery cruises with Texas A&M (partially funded by DOE) and recovered hydrate samples which were brought back for analysis. Further analysis was undertaken in collaboration with the National Research Council of Canada.^5,6

The American Chemical Society’s Third Chemical Congress of North America, held in Toronto, Canada, on June 5-10, 1988, included a “Gas Hydrates Symposium” organized by William Lawson of METC.

Fifteen of the twenty-three papers submitted for this meeting were from METC contractors or in-house researchers (Table 3.5.1). Generally, METC published reports summarizing research results only if the work was not published in a refereed publication or accepted as a presentation at a significant meeting.

Accordingly, these papers represent a good portion of the public record of in-house methane hydrate research at METC during this time period.

Table 3.5.1: Papers from DOE-Supported Research Presented at the “Methane Hydrates Symposium” of the Third Chemical Congress of North America, June 1988.