From Reuters:
Flammable ice: last hope or gravest threat? John Kemp
There is enough gas locked in ice-like crystals buried beneath the permafrost and trapped under the oceans to guarantee the world will not run out of fossil energy for centuries.There was a lot of Bonobo chatter about the hydrates (then called clathrates) back in 2007 although we didn't join the blather until January 2008: "Japan Mines 'Flammable Ice'".
This potential energy source will be irrelevant, however, to almost everyone for many decades to come, except perhaps Japan.
For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out whether there is a commercial way to extract the gas from methane hydrates, nicknamed flammable ice.
In an apparent breakthrough, state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) has extracted natural gas from hydrate accumulations hundreds of meters below the seabed from a drill ship off the east coast of Japan.
JOGMEC estimates its test area contains enough hydrate to cover 11 years worth of gas imports, according to an article published in the New York Times on Tuesday ("An energy coup for Japan: flammable ice" March 12).
Japan is a special case, because the country has almost no hydrocarbon resources of its own and relies almost entirely on energy imports.
The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology puts the total hydrate in the waters around Japan at enough to cover nearer 100 years of the country's needs.
For most other countries and companies, developing hydrates comes at the bottom of the list of commercial priorities behind easier and proven forms of fossil energy including conventional and unconventional oil and gas, coal-bed methane, gas-to-liquids and coal-to-liquids technology.
Methane hydrates are the reason the world will never run out of fossil fuels over any reasonable timeframe. But their uncontrolled release has also been identified by climate scientists as one of the biggest long-term dangers for the globe.
FLAMMABLE ICE
"Gas hydrate is a solid crystalline substance composed of water and natural gas (primarily methane) in which water molecules form a cage-like structure around the gas molecules," according to the authors of the 2012 Global Energy Assessment (GEA), a landmark study commissioned by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
"The cage structure of the hydrate molecule concentrates the component gas so that a single cubic metre of gas hydrate will yield approximately 160 cubic metres of gas and 0.8 cubic metres of water," if it is brought to atmospheric pressure and room temperature (20 degrees Centigrade)....MORE
