Publications

This paper summarizes the conditions, applied techniques, results, and lessons of major field gas production attempts from gas hydrates in the past and the necessity of longer term production testing with the scale of years to fulfill the gap between the currently available information and the knowledge required for commercial development. The temporal and spatial scales of field...

The United States Department of Energy, the MH21-S Research Consortium of Japan, and the United States Geological Survey are collaborating to enable gas hydrate scientific drilling and extended-duration reservoir response testing on the Alaska North Slope. To feasibly execute such a test, a location is required that is accessible from existing roads and gravel pads and that can be...

Cretaceous (post-Neocomian)–Quaternary Brookian strata of Arctic Alaska include the Colville Foreland Basin (CFB) and Arctic Alaska Prograded Margin (AAPM) Tectono-Sedimentary Elements (TSEs). The CFB TSE lies beneath the Alaska North Slope and Chukchi Sea shelf, and the AAPM TSE lies beneath the Arctic Alaska continental terrace of the Beaufort Sea shelf and slope. The CFB TSE rests on...

A working group in Commission II to investigate applications of confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) for organic petrology investigations has finalized with publication of the manuscript “Characterization of bituminite in Kimmeridge Clay by confocal laser scanning and atomic force microscopy” in the International Journal of Coal Geology. The manuscript is available via Open Access...

The Identification of Thermal Maturity-Relevant Organic Matter in Shale Working Group of the ICCP was established in 2008 to provide guidelines for identifying and measuring the reflectance of the population of dispersed organic matter that is relevant to thermal maturity determination. Information products published by the working group include ASTM D7708 Standard Test Method for...

No abstract available.

The hydrocarbon remnants of biologically diagnostic lipids inform our understanding of Earth’s early ecosystems, particularly where morphological vestiges of biology are absent or ambiguous. Yet both the analysis and interpretation of ancient biomarkers require scrutinous approaches. Here, we describe the status quo of Precambrian biomarker geochemistry with four examples that highlight...

A previously completed mineral resources assessment of the Texas Coastal Plain indicated the potential for the future discovery of uranium resources. Geoenvironmental assessments that include the hydrogeologic framework can be used as a tool to understand the potential effects of mining operations. The hydrogeologic framework for this study focused on the composite hydrogeologic unit of...

In-situ recovery (ISR) has been the only technique used to extract uranium from sandstone-hosted uranium deposits in the Pliocene Goliad Sand in the Texas Coastal Plain. Water plays a crucial role throughout the ISR lifecycle of production and groundwater restoration yet neither the water use nor other environmental footprints have been well documented. The goal of this study is to...

Sequence stratigraphy provides a unifying framework for integrating diverse observations to interpret sedimentary basin evolution; however, key time assumptions about stratigraphic elements spanning hundreds of kilometers are rarely quantified. We integrate new detrital zircon U-Pb (DZ) dates from 28 samples with seismic mapping to establish a chronostratigraphic framework across 800 km...

Gas hydrates are found in significant quantities on the North Slope of Alaska in subpermafrost sand units and intermixed in lower portions of permafrost within the hydrate stability window. While conventional surface seismic data and established imaging methods can indicate the presence of gas hydrate reservoirs, producing high-resolution images of (seismically) thin layers remains...

The National Energy Technology Laboratory, the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, and the U.S. Geological Survey are leading an effort to conduct an extended gas hydrate production test in northern Alaska. The proposed production test required the drilling of an initial stratigraphic test well (STW) to confirm the geologic conditions of the proposed test site. This well was...