Abstract A strong upward trend exists for the consumption of all energy sources as people throughout the world strive for a higher standard of living. Someday, possibly soon, the earth's store of easily accessed hydrocarbons will no longer satisfy our growing economies and populations. By then, an unfamiliar but kindred hydrocarbon resource called natural gas hydrate may become a significant source of energy. Approximately 35 years ago, Russian scientists made what was then a bold assertion that gas hydrates, a crystalline solid of water and natural gas and a historical curiosity to physical chemists, should occur in abundance in the natural environment. Since this early start, the scientific foundation has been built for the realization that gas hydrates are a global phenomenon, occurring in permafrost regions of the arctic and in deep-water parts of most continental margins worldwide. The amount of natural gas contained in the world's gas-hydrate accumulations is enormous, but these estimates remain highly speculative. Researchers have long speculated that gas hydrates could eventually be a commercial producible energy resource, yet technical and economic hurdles have historically made gas-hydrate development a distant goal instead of a near-term possibility. This view began to change in recent years with the realization that this unconventional resource could possibly be developed with the existing conventional oil and gas production technology. The pace of gas-hydrate energy assessment projects has significantly accelerated over the past several years, but many critical gas-hydrate exploration and development questions still remain. The exploitation and potential development of gas-hydrate resources is a complex technological problem. However, humans have successfully dealt with such complicated problems in the past to satisf your energy needs; technical innovations have been key to our historical successes.

Abstract This chapter describes the methodology and geologic findings of assessments of regional gas accumulations in the Greater Green River and Wind River basins that were conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE-NETL). These assessments were undertaken to better understand the nature and remaining potential of key elements of the nation’s natural-gas resource base. The resource assessments of DOE-NETL are unique in that they are not designed to estimate recoverability under either current or most likely future conditions. Instead, these assessments feature a detailed geologic characterization of the potential resource (a large fraction of the in-place resource) from which computer models can be used to estimate technically and economically recoverable resources for a variety of alternative future technology and market scenarios. This chapter focuses on data collected for selected parts of regional gas accumulations in the Greater Green River and Wind River basins. These results indicate the distribution of interpreted in-place resources by depth and by estimated porosity, permeability, and water saturation. Among other findings, the data confirm that a vast part of the remaining resource occurs in low-porosity formations with elevated water saturations. Also presented is an overview of the modeling results that indicates the sensitivity of resource recoverability to selected improvements in technology-related parameters.