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Strategic Carbon co-founder Dr. Richard Coffin led the 11th International Workshop on Methane Hydrate Research and Development in Corpus Christi, Texas.  This workshop was created for hydrate researchers and stakeholders to freely exchange information and identify research priorities in an effort to promote collaboration. The past ten workshops have been co-organized by Professors Bjørn Kvamme (University of Bergen, Norway), Tsutomu Uchida (Hokkaido University, Japan), Stephen Masutani (University of Hawaii), Dr. Norio Tenma, (AIST) and Richard Coffin (TAMU-CC). Participant countries at the conference, in addition to the U.S., typically include Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, New Zealand, Japan, India, and Chile, among twenty others. Previous workshops have been held in the US, Japan, India, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Scotland, and Norway.

The main focus of this workshop was:

  1. Gas hydrate energy: exploration, production, and economics;
  2. Methane and climate change: arctic, Antarctic and regions in between;
  3. Natural and anthropogenic warming contributions to coastal and industrial platform stability;
  4. Carbon dioxide injection for methane acquisition and sequestration.

The workshop included plenary lectures, oral presentations and posters, and breakout sessions.

The 1st International Workshop on Methane Hydrate R&D was held in March 2001 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Subsequent workshops have been held, on average, every 1.5 years in different countries including the U.S., Chile, Canada, U.K., Norway, New Zealand, Japan, and India.

With this strong international focus, topics addressed include new energy, climate change, and coastal and industrial platform stability. This research is of special interest to Texas because of the deposits of frozen methane under the Gulf of Mexico that have potential to increase the world’s energy supply and contribute to long-term energy security. It is estimated that there are 7,000 trillion cubic feet of methane in the Gulf of Mexico in reservoirs near the seafloor.  A workshop report is available.