Producers Test Ways to Draw Hydrates from Alaska's North Slope

For several years scientists have pondered whether vast stores of methane — the main component of natural gas — locked in hydrates on the North Slope and elsewhere in the Arctic could ever be produced.

Now the U.S. Department of Energy is working with two Alaska oil and gas producers and a regional municipal government in an effort to find out.

Test wells planned in 2010 and 2011 could point the way toward a way of economically extracting methane from hydrates.

A gas hydrate is a crystalline solid where a methane molecule is trapped in a cage of water molecules, essentially ice that contains gas.

The potential resources are immense. Methane hydrates may contain more organic carbon than all the world’s coal, oil and non-hydrate natural gas combined, the U.S. Geological Survey says.

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