The Department of Energy (DOE) on Friday said it will invest $5.6 million in more than a dozen research projects to increase understanding of the potential of methane hydrates as an energy source.

“The Energy Department’s long-term investments in shale gas research during the 1970s and ’80s helped pave the way for today’s boom in domestic natural gas production that is strengthening U.S. energy security while creating thousands of American jobs,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “While research on methane hydrates is still in the early stages, these research efforts as part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy could potentially yield significant new supplies of natural gas and further expand U.S. energy supplies.”

The 14 projects selected by DOE for funding will advance understanding of the nature and occurrence of deepwater and arctic gas hydrates and their implications for future resource development and environmental performance, the agency said. Previous DOE research and outside studies have concluded that the resource volume present “appears to be substantial and the accumulations that can be explored for and produced using existing technologies are potentially numerous,” according to DOE, but further research is needed to analyze the role of gas hydrates in the natural environment, demonstrate that gas hydrates can be produced commercially in an environmentally responsible manner, and further assess resource volumes, particularly in deepwater settings.

Funding amounts for the projects, which will focus on field programs for deepwater hydrate characterization, the response of methane hydrate systems to changing climates and advances in the understanding of gas-hydrate-bearing deposits, include:

Funding in amounts ranging from $89,000 to $420,000 was awarded to eight other methane hydrates research projects.

Earlier this year DOE said a small-scale test of technology to extract natural gas from methane hydrates conducted on Alaska’s North Slope was successful (see Daily GPI, May 3). The department launched a long-term production test in the Arctic as well as research to test technologies that could be used to locate, characterize and extract methane hydrates on a larger scale in the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Three years ago a landmark discovery of high saturations of natural gas hydrates within reservoir-quality sands in the Lower Tertiary Trend of the Gulf of Mexico was announced by DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy (see Daily GPI, May 15, 2009).