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Anchorage: BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc has completed a well drilled to help test whether it may be feasible to tap some of Alaska's vast gas hydrate reserves, the unit of BP Plc said yesterday.
The well, drilled at BP's Milne Point oilfield, was part of a federal Department of Energy programme evaluating the approximately 450 trillion cubic feet of gas hydrates that the US Geological Survey believes are held in the North Slope's permafrost.
Gas hydrates, solid crystals that combine methane and water, exist at specific temperature and pressure conditions. In the lower reaches of permafrost, such as that which underlies Alaska's North Slope, they are especially plentiful, according to the USGS.
But it has been impractical to tap them for useable energy supplies. Oil producers traditionally have regarded gas hydrates mostly as nuisances rather than as a serious potential new source of energy.
"Frankly, to date, they've been more of a drilling hazard than anything else," Scott Digert, BP's resource manager for Milne Point, said at a news conference Monday. "The question is: Could they be more than a hazard? Could they be a potential resource for the future?"
The two-week drilling project, at a long-known hydrate prospect called Mount Elbert, started on February 3.
The research team was able to test flow of free gas, though not in the standard method that brings gas to the surface, officials said at the news conference. The team also confirmed past estimates of the site's geology, officials said.
"We found the hydrates we expected to find there," Digert said.
The researchers took about 430 feet of core samples from the 3,000-foot-deep well for further analysis, the first methane hydrate core samples extracted from Alaska, officials said.
The Department of Energy hopes by 2015 to understand what portion of Alaska's gas hydrate reserves have development potential, said Ray Boswell, technology manager for the project.
For BP, Digert said, the well helps the company understand "ultimately, how hydrates can play into the entire energy portfolio, not only Alaska but worldwide." In the long term, it is possible that the gas hydrates will be used as a source of local energy fueling future North Slope operations, he said.
BP and the Department of Energy have been cooperating on gas hydrate research since 2002.
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