Grad student pioneers in gas hydrates
The search for gas hydrates just got easier thanks to the award-winning research of Rice graduate student Gaurav Bhatnagar.
More carbon is trapped inside ice-like crystals under the seafloor than in all the world's oil, gas and coal reserves combined. Until now, however, the inaccessibility of gas hydrates has prevented their commercial use.
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Bhatnagar, a chemical engineering doctoral student in the lab of George Hirasaki, has expressed the results of complex computer models in terms of dimensionless groups or variables that make it easier to predict where gas hydrates will form and in what quantity.
"Gaurav's accomplishments have earned him a substantial reputation as a quality researcher," said Hirasaki, the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Bhatnagar's work has not gone unnoticed. In 2006, he won the Society of Petroleum Engineers' (SPE) Gulf Coast Regional Student Paper Contest, the SPE's International Student Paper Contest and an Outstanding Student Paper Award from the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The latter award was presented at the AGU's May 22-25 meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, where Bhatnagar presented his findings.
Bhatnagar developed a way to use a single variable—depth of the sulfate-methane interface—as a shorthand measure to effectively predict where hydrates will occur and the quantity of hydrate accumulation.
“Sulfate-methane interface depth is a standard measure that can be easily calculated from shallow sediment cores," said Bhatnagar. "We have shown that this sulfate-methane interface can be directly used as a proxy for quantifying the amount of gas hydrate in the sediments.”
Methane hydrates form beneath the ocean floor, where temperatures plunge and the weight of the ocean exerts thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch, trapping methane inside ice-like crystals stretching tens to hundreds of meters underground. Dubbed the "ice that burns," hydrates release gaseous methane when melted. As much as 20 trillion tons of methane is estimated to be contained in gas hydrates. The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that commercial development of 1 percent of U.S. hydrate resources would more than double the nation’s gas reserves.
Bhatnagar's research is supported by Rice's Shell Center for Sustainability and by a Kobayashi Graduate Fellowship. He plans to graduate in December and will go to work in the gas hydrate group at Houston-based Shell Oil.
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