Logging Characteristics of Methane Hydrate

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Mark Mathews,
Geophysics Group,
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Abstract

Natural gas (NG), which normally consists chiefly of methane, is a widely distributed resource, and until recently was generally thought to occur within the lithosphere as either a free or dissolved gas. During the 1960s, however, Soviet scientists began to recognize that NG could additionally occur in nature as a "solid gas," that is, in a stable ice-like form. For historical reasons, this NG-containing solid was referred to as "methane hydrate," though a more technically correct name for this compound is a water clathrate of natural gas.