2,200 kilometers northwest of Calgary, Alberta. The most important natural gas hydrate research site in the area, the Mallik gas hydrate field, was discovered in 1971 through an exploration well by Imperial Oil Ltd., and is located 50 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. As natural gas hydrates are assumed to underlie large portions of the world’s Arctic continental areas and marine continental shelf and are a tremendous potential future hydrocarbon resource, the Mallik drill site is a location of major interest. Consequently, it has been an area of ongoing scientific and technical research on gas hydrates for more than thirty years. General physical and geological description The Department of Natural Resources in Canada identified the Mackenzie Delta region (NRCan) as an important hydrate-bearing region in the Northwest Territories of Canada. NRCan gas hydrate resource estimates from 2005 indicated a hydrate potential between 2.4 x 1012 and 87 x 1012 m3 of natural gas in the Mallik region. A re-evaluation of the Beaufort Sea-Mackenzie Delta basin (see Figure 2) gas-hydrate resource potential in 2010 by the Geological Survey of Canada revealed a potential 8.82 x 1012 m3 of raw initial natural gas in place (GIP). Nearly all of the natural gas-hydrate accumulations identified in the Mallik area lie beneath a 300 to 700 meter-thick layer of permafrost, at an expected depth of between 890 and 1,100 meters below the surface. The Mallik research drilling site in the Mackenzie Delta basin is located on land and beneath the Beaufort Shelf to about 100 m water depth; the ground-temperature régime in the subsurface is controlled by thick intervals of ice-bonded permafrost. In the case of permafrost-associated settings in northern Alaska and Canada, gas-hydrate occurrences have been identified in sand-rich units deposited mainly in deltaic environments. Many of the deposits are thought to have formed during the last glacial period when ground temperatures cooled and formerly free-gas reservoirs likely became trapped as hydrates. The geometry, host-reservoir and physical and chemical properties of the modern natural gas-hydrate occurrences point to a conversion of conventional free-gas accumulations when they were cooled down to a point that was well within the hydrate stability conditions, allowing hydrates to form (see UNEP Global Outlook on Methane Gas Hydrates (2012, in progress) for more details). The Mallik Gas Hydrate Production Research Well, Canada The Mallik Gas Hydrate Production Research Well, part of the "Methane Hydrate Research and Development (R&D)