Major natural gas hydrate reserve discovered in Indian Ocean
A major deposit of natural gas in the Indian Ocean has been discovered by a joint expedition between India and the US. This discovery offers the potential to significantly expand production in a region that is currently a big importer.
India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and the US Geological Survey found the highly enriched reserve of natural gas hydrate, an icy form of the fuel, in the Bay of Bengal off the country’s east coast. According to a statement by the US agency, this is potentially the first producible reserve of its kind in the waters.
They agency also said that the amount of the fuel contained in the planet’s gas hydrate accumulations is estimated to “greatly exceed the volume of all known conventional gas resources”.
“Advances like the Bay of Bengal discovery will help unlock the global energy resource potential of gas hydrates as well help define the technology needed to safely produce them,” Walter Guidroz, energy resources program coordinator for the US Geological Survey, said in the statement.
The discovery follows an exploration of the region from March to July of last year. It is the result of the most comprehensive gas hydrate field venture in the world to date, made up of scientists from India, Japan and the United States.
While earlier finds of hydrate accumulations were unlikely to be producible, formations in sand reservoirs like the one recently announced are the most easily tapped with existing technologies. The gas hydrates discovered are located in coarse-grained sand-rich depositional systems in the Krishna-Godavari Basin and is made up of a sand-rich, gas-hydrate-bearing fan and channel-levee gas hydrate prospects.
The next step is to determine whether production from the Bay of Bengal site is economic.
“The results from this expedition mark a critical step forward to understanding the energy resource potential of gas hydrates,” Tim Collett, a senior scientist with the US agency, said in the statement.
The international team of scientists was led by state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), in cooperation with the USGS, the Japanese Drilling Company, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
In addition, USGS is working closely with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan on the analysis of pressure core samples collected from sand reservoirs with high gas hydrate concentrations.