WE ARE ENTERING THE GAS AGE
Move over shale gas, here comes methane hydrate. Last week (3/12) the Japanese government's drilling ship Chikyu started flaring off gas from a hole drilled into a solid deposit of methane and ice, 1,000 feet beneath the seabed under 3,300 feet of water, 30 miles off the Japanese coast.
The real significance of this gas flare probably lies decades in the future, though the Japanese are talking about commercial production by 2018. The technology for getting fuel out of hydrated methane, also known as clathrate, is in its infancy. After many attempts to turn this "fire ice" into gas by heating it proved uneconomic, the technology used in Japan - depressurizing the stuff - was first tested five years ago in Northern Canada. It looks much more promising.
Methane hydrate is found all around the world beneath the seabed near continental margins as well as in the Arctic under land. Any combination of low temperature and high pressure causes methane and water to crystallize together in a sort of molecular lattice. Nobody knows exactly how much there is, but probably more than twice all the other fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, put together.
The proof that hydrate can be extracted should finally bury the stubborn myth that the world will run out of fossil fuels in any meaningful sense in the next few centuries, let alone decades.