Methane hydrates: Abundance
Possibly more than all other gas, but how sure are we?
What this tab covers How much of this energy there is: the natural flow or stock, the share that could be harnessed, and how much is used today, compared with world primary energy use (592 EJ in 2024).Hydrates may hold more methane than all other natural gas, but estimates span orders of magnitude, and the recoverable part is far smaller and not yet produced commercially.
A stock: finite on human time scalesHow much there is
| Measure | Value | Compared with world energy use | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gas in place, recent synthesis | about 1,800 Gt of carbon (about 2,400 Gt of CH4) Gt4 | about 115,000 EJ at 48 MJ/kg, roughly 195 times world primary energy use (calculated) | Excludes Antarctica. A UNEP-led review gives a similar 1,600 Gt of carbon. |
| Gas in place, range cited by US DOE | 250,000 to 700,000 tcf (about 7,000 to 20,000 tcm) tcm5 | about 270,000 to 765,000 EJ, roughly 460 to 1,300 times world energy use (calculated) | Older and higher than the recent synthesis above. |
| Early estimates (1990s) | 3,100 to 7,600,000 tcm in ocean sediments; consensus about 20,000 tcm tcm1 | Shows the uncertainty: over three orders of magnitude. | |
| Potentially recoverable worldwide | about 3 x 10^14 cubic metres (300 tcm, about 160 Gt of carbon, calculated) cubic metres6 | about 11,600 EJ, roughly 20 times world energy use (calculated) | Preliminary estimate focused on sand-hosted deposits. |
| Resources (BGR) | 184 tcm (end-2016)7 | 6,992 EJ (BGR), roughly 12 times world energy use (calculated) | Compare conventional gas resources of 323 tcm in the same study. BGR's later editions were not accessible for checking. |
| Alaska North Slope, technically recoverable | 53.8 tcf (about 1.5 tcm)8 | about 59 EJ, a tenth of one year's world energy use (calculated) | Down from about 85 tcf in 2008. There is no known commercial production from gas hydrate anywhere. |
Measured against 592 EJ of world primary energy in 2024 (Energy Institute Statistical Review 2025), even the cautious in-place estimate is about two centuries of world energy use. That number misleads. Most hydrate is dispersed in fine mud at low concentration, and the share that might be recovered is roughly a tenth of the total, about 20 years of world energy at most. Estimates have also fallen as surveys improved: from a consensus of about 20,000 tcm in the 1990s to about 3,300 tcm today (the 2,400 Gt of methane in the recent synthesis, converted at 0.72 kg per cubic metre).
Sources
- How much gas is trapped within gas hydrate accumulations? (T. Collett) AAPG Energy Minerals Division, 2000
- The interaction of climate change and methane hydrates (Ruppel and Kessler), Reviews of Geophysics 55 American Geophysical Union, 2017
- Methane Hydrates Program fact sheet US Department of Energy, 2020
- Current perspectives on gas hydrate resources (Boswell and Collett), Energy and Environmental Science 4, 1206 Royal Society of Chemistry, 2011
- Energy Study 2017: Data and Developments Concerning German and Global Energy Supplies (Table 2, reserves and resources at end-2016) BGR (German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources), 2017
- USGS estimates 53.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas hydrate resources in the Alaska North Slope USGS, 2019