Petroleum System Characterization of Terrebonne Mini-Basin Gas Hydrates in NW Walker Ridge Area, Gulf of Mexico
Gas hydrates hold vast volumes of methane and affect a wide range of scientific interests including drilling hazards, potential future energy resource, global carbon cycling, geohazards, and climate change. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates 607 trillion cubic meters (21,444 trillion cubic feet) of gas hydrates in place in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) alone (Boswell et al., 2012). Although total global estimates of gas hydrate volumes vary, even the most conservative estimates consider methane hydrates to be the world’s largest reservoir of fossil fuel with it potentially being at least 3 times larger than all of the world's conventional and unconventional oil, gas and coal combined (Wygrala et al., 2016). There is great opportunity for improving our understanding of gas hydrates through the BPSM approach due to its sophisticated treatment of subsurface pressure and temperature through time with very short time steps and very fine spatial resolutions.