Huge reserves of natural gas hydrates found in the Bay of Bengal
Huge reserves of natural gas hydrates found in the Bay of Bengal
A large natural gas discovery has been made in the Indian Ocean following a joint expedition by India and the United States, opening up a new resource to meet energy needs.
India’s oil ministry and the US Geological Survey made the discovery of large, highly enriched accumulations of natural gas hydrate — an icy form of the fuel — in the Bay of Bengal.
“This is the first discovery of its kind in the Indian Ocean that has the potential to be producible,” the US agency said in a statement.
Natural gas hydrates are a naturally occurring, ice-like combination of natural gas and water found in oceans and polar regions. The amount of gas within the world’s gas hydrate accumulations is estimated to greatly exceed the volume of all known conventional gas resources.
India had in Septem-ber 2014 agreed to collaborate to explore gas hydrates potential in the country and identify sites for pilot production testing.
Gas hydrates are considered as vast resou-rces of natural gas and are known to occur in marine sediments on continental shelf margins. Gas hydrate resources in India are estimated at 1,894 trillion cubic metres and these deposits occ-ur in Western, Eastern and Andaman offshore areas.
“Advances like the Bay of Bengal discovery will help unlock the global energy resource potential of gas hydra-tes as well as help defi-ne the technology needed to safely produce them,” said Walter Guidroz, USGS Energy Resources Programme coordinator.
This discovery 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 US.
The discovery follows an exploration of the region from March to July of last year.
“The scientists conducted ocean drilling, conventional sediment coring, pressure coring, downhole logging and analytical activities to assess the geologic occurrence, regional context and characteristics of gas hydrate deposits in the offshore of India,” the statement said.
The US agency said although it is possible to produce natural gas from gas hydrates, the-re are significant technical challenges, depe-nding on the location and type of formation.
Previous studies have shown that gas hydrate at high concentrations in sand reservoirs is the type of occurrence that can be most easily produced with existing technologies.
The gas hydrate 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 steps for research will involve production testing in these sand reservoirs to determine if natural gas production is practical and economic.
