Methane Hydrates are one of those apparently mythical energy sources that never quite get to commercial production. The Independent reports that China and Japan may be making progress on extracting the burning ice from the oceans (at who knows what cost to the climate) - Japan and China successfully extract ‘combustible ice’ from seafloor.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that the fuel was successfully mined by a drilling rig operating in the South China Sea on Thursday. Chinese Minister of Land and Resources Jiang Daming declared the event a breakthrough moment heralding a potential “global energy revolution.” A drilling crew in Japan reported a similar successful operation two weeks earlier, on 4 May offshore the Shima Peninsula.

For Japan, methane hydrate offers the chance to reduce its heavy reliance of imported fuels if it can tap into reserves off its coastline. In China, it could serve as a cleaner substitute for coal-burning power plants and steel factories that have polluted much of the country with lung-damaging smog.

Technology Review has an article on research into a new technique for transporting natural gas in the form of methane hydrates - A Cheaper, Safer Way to Move Natural Gas.

Storing and shipping natural gas by trapping it in ice--using technology being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy--could cut shipping costs for the fuel, making it easier for countries to buy natural gas from many different sources, and eventually leading to more stable supplies worldwide.

The DOE researchers say the approach could also be safer than current methods of shipping natural gas, such as cooling it to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG), since there is no danger that iced natural gas will explode if the shipping container is damaged.

The technology traps natural gas in the form of methane hydrate, in which methane, the main component of natural gas, is confined within cage-like ice crystals. Conventional technologies for making methane hydrate take hours or days: they involve mixing water and the hydrocarbon in large pressurized vessels. The new approach forces water and methane through a specially designed nozzle that creates the methane hydrate "almost instantaneously," says Charles Taylor, the lead researcher on the project at the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh. As the mixture exits the nozzle, it quickly forms hydrate, which looks like snow.

The challenge, Taylor says, was designing the nozzle to create precisely the right conditions for forming the methane hydrate immediately after the mixture of water and methane exits the nozzle. If the hydrate forms too soon, it clogs the nozzle. Although the approach has only been demonstrated at a small scale, it could prove cheaper than existing transportation methods, he says.

The difficulty and costs of transporting natural gas--it is either sent through pipelines or converted to LNG-- means many natural gas resources, particularly remote ones, are too expensive to access. Taylor says the new technology could help rescue some of these "stranded" resources--increasing worldwide supplies and allowing more countries to become producers.

The results of a methane hydrate demonstration project in Japan by Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding, a large maker of ships for transporting oil and natural gas, suggested that the total cost of transporting methane hydrate--including the infrastructure required to make it and release the gas at its destination--could be "much lower than that of LNG," according to the company. That demonstration used conventional methods for making methane hydrates, Taylor says. His new technology would make the approach even cheaper, he says, although the researchers haven't yet determined by how much.

The SMH reports BP's "containment box" idea to try to reduce the flow of oil into the gulf of mexico has failed, with methane hydrates clogging the top of the structure - Oil spill: new scale of disaster looms as containment box clogs.

Concern has grown that the US Gulf coast is facing a whole new level of environmental disaster after the best short-term fix for a massive oil spill ran into serious trouble.

BP's giant containment box lay idle on the seabed as engineers furiously tried to figure out how to stop it from clogging with ice crystals, preparing for attempts to resuscitate their vital mission in the next day or so.

The British energy giant, which owns the lion's share of the leaking oil and has accepted responsibility for the clean-up, has tried to banish the notion that the so-called "dome" is a "silver bullet" to end the crisis.

But should efforts fail to make the giant funnel system effective, there is no solid plan B to prevent potentially tens of millions of gallons of crude from causing one of the worst environmental catastrophes ever.

Untold damage is already being done by the 83,000 barrels estimated to be in the sea so far, but the extent of that harm will rise exponentially if the only solution is a relief well that will take months to drill.

There are also fears that the slick, which covers an area of about 5200 square kilometres, could be carried around the Florida peninsula if it spreads far enough south to pick up a special current.

"If this gusher continues for several months, it's going to cover up the Gulf coast and it's going to get down into the loop current and that's going to take it down the Florida Keys and up the east coast of Florida," warned Florida senator Bill Nelson.

"You are talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, to our fisheries, very possibly disruption of our military testing and training, which is in the Gulf of Mexico," he told CNN's State of the Union program.

Inhabitat has a post about a Chinese discovery of large amounts of methane hydrates on the Tibetan plateau - China Developing “Combustible Ice” as New Energy Source.

Last September, China discovered a large reserve of “combustible ice” on the tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. “Combustible ice” is essentially frozen natural gas – a natural gas hydrate, and is one of the newest energy sources to be discovered. The new reserves found in China reveal a very large supply equal at least 35 billion tonnes of oil, enough to supply China with 90 years worth of energy.

Combustible ice has been found in high altitude frozen plateaus as well as underwater in marine sediments. Natural gas hydrates are essentially just frozen methane and water and can literally be lit on fire bringing a whole new meaning to fire and ice. Researchers still need to get a better understanding of how best to handle the fuel, for it to be commercially exploited. The US DOE is looking into it as well and researchers expect that the hydrate will have to go through a phase change and melt it into methane and water before it can be efficiently combusted. If left to melt on its own as the earth warms though, methane could be released into the atmosphere, and it could cause even more damage than if it were just burned.

Rigzone has an article about high hopes for a methane hydrates development offshore from New Zealand (in an area where a wind farm would probably achieve as high a utilisation rate as you'd find anywhere in the world, I'd note) - NZ Methane Hydrates May Soon Be Developed.

A gas industry using frozen gas hydrates below the seabed off the East Coast could be developed in the near future thanks to rapid global technical developments.

George Hooper, executive director of the Centre for Advanced Engineering, told a recent Oil and Gas conference in Wellington that exploitation of methane hydrates could transform New Zealand's energy market.

Hooper is lead author in a recent CAE report on an options analysis for commercial development of energy from offshore methane hydrates in New Zealand.

He said 'sweet spots' containing high concentrations (about 4-10%) of methane hydrate found in sheets under the seabed off the East Coast may contain about 8.5 - 21 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of recoverable gas.

He said New Zealand's methane hydrates endowment is very likely the largest in the world on a per capita basis and potentially one of the largest resources in the world.

Inferred resources of hydrates in New Zealand are 813 TCF with 40 TCF identified as potentially economically recoverable. Inferred world resources of hydrates are 20,000 TCF.

The ice-like crystals of water and methane molecules intermixed with sediments are found over 50,000 sq km from offshore Marlborough to offshore Gisborne, as well as off Fiordland.

A number of countries were now working on developing commercial gas production from hydrates including Japan, India, the US and South Korea. Japan was talking of a 2015 timeline for first production, though this might be optimistic, Hooper said.

He anticipates rapid progress in the engineering geology and production technologies required for hydrates extraction, both internationally and in New Zealand.

This demanded a considerable ramp-up of hydrate research and development effort here to ensure New Zealand has the earliest possible opportunity to develop its hydrate resources and associated skills.

A conceptual well development plan for a known Wairarapa hydrates 'sweet spot' site offshore Wairarapa, east of Wellington, was prepared for the study.

Costings for a small scale 10 petajoule a year 'proving' project indicated this option would require capital expenditure of $370 million.

To produce 150 PJ of gas, equal to the entire New Zealand gas market, the capital expenditure would be about $4 billion, about twice the $2 billion capital spending required to produce a similar volume of conventional natural gas.

The cost of building a 300 PJ project both for domestic gas use and for the export of LNG, would cost about $8 billion.

Technology Review has a look at developments in the world of methane hydrates - Mining "Ice That Burns".

Trapped in molecular cages resembling ice, at the bottom of the ocean and in terrestrial permafrost all over the world, is a supply of natural gas that, by conservative estimates, is equivalent to twice the amount of energy contained in all other fossil fuels remaining in the earth's crust. The question has been whether or not this enormous reserve of energy, known as methane hydrates, existed in nature in a form that was worth pursuing, and whether or not the technology existed to harvest it.

Last Friday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) announced the discovery of suitable conditions for mining methane hydrates 1,000 meters beneath the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico. Together with Chevron and the U.S. Department of Energy, the USGS discovered the reserve of hydrates in high concentrations in 15-to-30-meter-thick beds of sand--conditions very much like terrestrial methane hydrate reserves, which have already yielded commercially useful flow rates. These deposits are substantially different from the gas hydrates that have previously been discovered in U.S. coastal waters, which exist in relatively shallow waters at the surface of the seabed and have become a concern for climate scientists because of their potential to melt rapidly and release large quantities of methane into the atmosphere.

In the spring of 2008, a joint Canadian-Japanese expedition in Mallik in the Northwest Territories, Canada, established that methane hydrates could be harvested by using a water pump to depressurize a well already drilled into the reserve. This involved lowering the pressure pumping out the water that naturally accumulates in the well. Crucially, it required only 10 to 15 percent of the energy represented by the gas that flowed out of the well, making it a much more viable approach than earlier methods used to harvest hydrates, which involved melting them with warm water. Standard oil and gas drilling equipment was used to reenter an old well drilled to a depth of 3,500 feet and then "refurbish" it by casing the entire well with lengths of steel tubing that cemented into place in order to prevent it from collapsing.

Hydrates require both cold temperatures and high pressure to form; eliminating either condition frees the gas from its icy cage, but past attempts to do this by heating the hydrates proved prohibitively difficult. The Canadian-Japanese expedition successfully produced up to 4,000 cubic meters of gas a day during a six-day trial in 2008 using depressurization.

"I think [the Gulf of Mexico find] and Mallik are two revolutionary events," says Timothy Collett, a geologist with the USGS and one of the world's foremost authorities on gas hydrates.

While no one believes that all of the world's methane hydrates will be recoverable, the scale of global reserves has been described by the U.S. Department of Energy as "staggering." They occur anywhere that water, methane, low temperatures, and high pressure co-occur--in other words, in the 23 percent of the world's land area covered by permafrost and at the bottom of the ocean, particularly the continental shelf.

Increased interest in naturally occurring methane hydrates has been driven by the desire for energy independence from the Middle East and Russia and by the need to find energy sources with less of a potential impact on the climate than coal. (Natural gas produces half as much carbon as coal per unit of energy.) This is reflected by an exponential growth in the number of scientific papers published on the subject per year, according to Carolyn Koh, codirector of the Center for Hydrate Research at the Colorado School of Mines. More than a dozen expeditions designed to harvest or sample terrestrial and marine hydrate reserves have been launched since 2001, not only in the United States and Canada, but also in Japan, Korea, China, and India, according to Collett.

Rigzone has an article on efforts to investigate the possibility of extracting methane from methane hydrate deposits on Alaska's north slope - Producers Test Ways to Draw Hydrates from Alaska's North Slope.

For several years scientists have pondered whether vast stores of methane -- the main component of natural gas -- locked in hydrates on the North Slope and elsewhere in the Arctic could ever be produced. Now the U.S. Department of Energy is working with two Alaska oil and gas producers and a regional municipal government in an effort to find out.

Test wells planned in 2010 and 2011 could point the way toward a way of economically extracting methane from hydrates.

A gas hydrate is a crystalline solid where a methane molecule is trapped in a cage of water molecules, essentially ice that contains gas. The potential resources are immense. Methane hydrates may contain more organic carbon than all the world's coal, oil and non-hydrate natural gas combined, the U.S. Geological Survey says. Much of this is in difficult-to-reach offshore hydrates, but a lot of it is onshore in Arctic regions.

Studies by USGS geologists indicate a potential resource of 500 trillion cubic feet of in-place methane in hydrates believed to exist across Alaska's North Slope. From 44 trillion to 100 trillion cubic feet of this could exist right at industry's doorstep, below or near the existing oil field infrastructure on the slope, the agency says.

The question is whether methane can actually be produced from a hydrate, and the North Slope will provide a good test bed to find out, the DOE believes.

The agency has enlisted two producing companies, BP and ConocoPhillips, to try out two separate production ideas. The North Slope Borough is engaged in a separate project with DOE to assess whether hydrates are replenishing gas reserves in two small gas fields the borough operates near Barrow, 180 miles west of the North Slope fields. The borough will also drill a production test well in the East Barrow gas field.

Methane hydrates exist under certain pressure and temperature conditions, and they are known to exist offshore in buried sediments along continental shelves in several regions of the world.

Conditions are also ripe for onshore methane hydrates in Arctic regions, where there are underground geologic formations that contain hydrocarbons. This includes much of the North Slope and many parts of northern Canada and Russia.

Onshore hydrates appear to be formed by the migration of methane upward from the deeply buried source rocks into hydrates that form to trap the methane just below the permafrost, at depths of 2,000 feet to 4,000 feet.

The onshore hydrates, at least on the North Slope, also appear to be in thicker layers and more concentrated than offshore hydrates, and could therefore be easier to find and possibly produce, says Gordon Pospisil, technology and project manager of BP's Alaska hydrate program.

David Schoderbek, Conoco's Alaska hydrates project director, said offshore hydrates appear to occur in lower concentrations and in non-reservoir rocks, with densities that could be in the range of 20 percent. In contrast, the onshore hydrates on the North Slope appear to occupy as much as 60 percent to 80 percent of the pore space in sandstone.

North Slope producers have long known that hydrates exist around the large producing North Slope fields, where they were considered hazards when drill crews would unexpectedly encounter them while drilling conventional wells. Hydrates are believed to have caused gas "blowouts," or dangerous uncontrolled flows of gas, on wells on the North Slope.

Recent advances in seismic techniques and interpretation of well logs, or data gathered during drilling has allowed hydrates to be identified and mapped with greater accuracy.

Pospisil said what makes the North Slope ideal as a test-bed is the presence of industry infrastructure -- availability of rigs and services, roads, utilities -- that will allow production tests to be done more economically than in offshore regions.

BP's hydrate test project has been underway since 2002 in collaboration with the DOE. The goal is a long-term hydrate production test. The company drilled a well in the Milne Point field in 2007 to confirm results of its seismic profiling and to extract cores, or samples of rock containing methane hydrates. The project was successful on both counts: Drilling showed the hydrate was right where it was supposed to be, Pospisil said, and 100 feet of hydrate core was extracted. The test also showed the reservoir rock to contain higher saturation of hydrate than expected.

In a second phase of the project, BP will drill a second well and conduct a long-term production test that could last between three and 18 months, Pospifil said. Locations for the well are still being considered. It could be in the Milne Point, Kuparuk River fields or the western part of the Prudhoe Bay field, he said.

The test will involve gradually depressuring the hydrate to encourage the methane to flow, Pospifil said. Potential problems include possible re-freezing of the hydrate around the well-bore, which would impede the methane entering the well. This might be controlled by installing a heat tape to keep the temperature above freezing at the well perforations, or the points where gas would enter the well.

Problems could include sand and water that could flow into the well and impede the flow of methane to the surface.

Pospisil believes the sand problem can be solved just as solutions are being found for sand production that occurs with heavy oil. Handling the water that is produced imposes a cost, but it might also be an advantage because the water will be fresh, not briny like most water produced with oil and gas. Pure water is ideal for use in enhanced oil recovery projects in nearby conventional producing fields.

ConocoPhillips' carbon dioxide injection test, also planned for 2010, attempts to demonstrate in the field a process the company has successfully shown to work in the laboratory, that a CO2 molecule will displace the methane molecule in a hydrate while also preserving its structure, according to Schoderbek.

The downside of other hydrate production concepts, such as pressure drawdown, is that they could destabilize the hydrate, creating the problem of sand and water coming up the well. If the hydrate is preserved, however, only methane comes up the well, Schoderbek said.

ConocoPhillips' lab work has also shown that replacing methane with carbon dioxide in the hydrate appears to strengthen it.

Jamais Cascio has another post on geoengineering, this time looking at recent reports on methane emissions from the melting permafrost - Methane: It's Not Just From Your Cheeseburger. The interesting new take out is that most CO2 oriented geoengineering approaches won't work to mitigate large volumes of methane released into the atmosphere, which narrows the solution space considerably.

So that 50 gigatons of methane? That's the equivalent of 3600 gigatons of carbon dioxide, in terms of greenhouse effect.

To put that into comparison: the Earth's atmosphere holds a total of about 3000 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide.

This would more than double the concentration of CO2e in the atmosphere.

So this is not just huge, it's really freaking huge.

There's still nothing conclusive showing an overall increase in atmospheric concentration at this point, though, so hopefully that means that we haven't seen a catastrophic level of release (yet).

As I said, we still don't know if this is the methane hydrates beginning to melt. If it is, then even going to zero CO2 emissions now won't do a damn thing. Ocean thermal inertia will keep the temperatures up undersea for a good while, even if we stopped all carbon outputs now. Thermal inertia alone would keep us warming on land for a couple of decades, too, after we zero out, but that's comparatively less catastrophic than the hydrates.

Albedo-modification geoengineering (stratospheric sulfates, "space mirrors," that sort of thing) won't do much to change ocean temperatures in a short enough period to stop hydrate melts. At best, it would moderate atmospheric temperatures enough to stave off some of the most disastrous effects of a temperature spike. It seems highly likely to me that this is going to be a major point of political and scientific debate in the next few years, and we'll probably see some early attempts by early in the next decade.

CO2 sequestration geo (iron or urea dumps in the ocean, bioengineered supertrees, that sort of thing) won't do a damn thing about methane, even if it worked.

Probably the only possible geoengineering response with a direct impact on the methane would be some kind of in-situ methane conversion to CO2, either with chemistry or with methanotrophic bacteria.

It's hard to imagine a geoengineering project gone wrong that would be worse than a methane hydrate melt; a big methane hydrate event appears to be connected to one of the largest extinctions in geological history (bigger than the KT event killing the dinosaurs). 90+% of all species gone.

I've made it abundantly clear that I don't think geo is a good idea. It's a pretty damn crazy idea, in a lot of ways. But if this methane report is as bad as it looks to be, crazy ideas may be all that we have left.

Methane Hydrates ("the ice that burns") are one of the alternative sources of hydrocarbons - and one with reserves estimated to be larger than those of oil, gas and coal combined - that seem to live in a perpetual twilight on the verge of being harvested.

While the topic seems to pop up somewhere every couple of months, thus far I haven't noticed any actual progress in this area (which is probably a good thing from a global warming point of view).

The latest manifestation of the search for fire from the deeps is described in an article in Der Spiegel - "China and India Exploit Icy Energy Reserves" - which describes efforts in Asia to slake their thirst for energy by finding a way to utilise offshore methane hydrate fields. The article also describes a theoretical way of sequestering carbon dioxide while extracting methane from the frozen hydrates, which sounds like a carbon addict's wildest fantasy come true.

China and India have reported massive finds of frozen methane gas off their coasts, which they hope will satisfy their energy needs. But environmentalists fear that tapping these resources could have adverse effects on the world climate.

On the surface, it looked like any other drill core from the ocean floor. Its shimmering grayish-green surface was both slippery and grainy at the same time. But the sample only revealed its exciting secret when the geologists on board the "Bavenit," a drilling ship, lowered the pressure in the steel tube and held a lit match to the upper end. Suddenly a yellowish-red flame began licking from the slick material.

"As astonishing phenomenon," noted the scientists from the Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey. So astonishing, in fact, that when their ship pulled into the harbor at Shenzen on June 12 of this year, the scientists were all smiles.

Shengxiong Yang and Nengyou Wu, the two expedition leaders, stand an excellent chance of going down in the history of their country as heroes. The material they pulled from the muddy ocean floor of the South China Sea has the potential to satisfy the energy needs of China and its fast-growing economy.

The flames in the drill core were coming from methane hydrate, a material first discovered in the 1970s. Its unique characteristic is that it is a seemingly frozen and yet flammable material.

In the West, this potential fuel from the ocean floor has for the most part been the stuff of fantasy. But it's a different story in Asia. The People's Republic of China is investing millions to study this massive source of energy. The same holds true for India, South Korea and Taiwan, all nations that are on a fast track to surpassing the West as economic powers. ...

Methane, trapped in an icy cage of water molecules, occurs in permafrost and, in even greater quantities, beneath the ocean floor. It forms only under specific pressure and temperature conditions. These conditions are especially prevalent in the ocean along the continental shelves, as well as in the deeper waters of semi-enclosed seas (see graphic).

World reserves of the frozen gas are enormous. Geologists estimate that significantly more hydrocarbons are bound in the form of methane hydrate than in all known reserves of coal, natural gas and oil combined. "There is simply so much of it that it cannot be ignored," says leading expert Gerhard Bohrman of the Research Center for Ocean Margins (RCOM) in the northern German city of Bremen.

A few months ago, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao held the material in his hand -- or rather, in a metal ice bucket with flames shooting from the top. He was visiting an Australian research center at the time, but now he can just as easily watch the same spectacle unfold in Chinese research laboratories.

The Chinese researchers found the methane hydrate, also known as crystal gas, because of its molecular structure, in a layer of sediment 15 to 20 meters (50 to 65 feet) thick off the Chinese coast. "It was embedded in clay and silt ," says John Roberts, whose firm Geotek provided the technical equipment for the drilling expedition.

This is the sort of information natural gas companies like to hear. The porosity of this sediment mix is well suited to drilling for the gas. "The gas hydrate has never found in this form before," Roberts explains. It suddenly seems conceivable that production using conventional techniques could work.

One possible method would involve the use of drilling tubes that would conduct heated fluid into the cold reservoirs. This would dissolve the icy cage encasing the methane. The next step would be to capture the gas through a second opening.

These are the kinds of prospects that have inspired others to emulate the Chinese researchers' success. Japan has built the world's largest research drilling ship, the Chikyu, primarily to study methane hydrate. India has invested €200 million to launch a major national program -- and has already reported successes.

Indian researchers discovered a 132-meter (433-foot) thick layer of methane hydrate in the Krishna-Godavari Basin. "One of the thickest that's ever been found in the world," says Malcolm Lall, the director of the Indian gas hydrate program. The team has also been successful in the Andaman Islands, were they discovered, 600 meters (984 feet) beneath the ocean floor, a layer of frozen methane embedded in ash sediments from prehistoric volcanic eruptions. "This too is a first," says Lall.

But many scientists see the flames licking out of samples in Indian and Chinese laboratories as a warning sign. They fear that one day the methane from the ocean floor will heat up the world's climate to a far greater extent than coal, oil and natural gas do today.

This is precisely what scientists at the Institute for Marine Research (GEOMAR) based in the northern German seaport of Kiel want to avert. They hope to be able to transform a potential curse into a blessing before it's too late. They envision a method whereby the flammable gas would be extracted from the sediment with the help of carbon dioxide.

"The carbon dioxide could be obtained from the exhaust gases of coal power plants, for instance," says Klaus Wallmann, the direct of a research project known as SUGAR, which was recently formed to study the issue. What he proposes sounds almost too good to be true: producing fuel while sequestering greenhouse gas deep beneath the ocean floor -- eliminating energy bottlenecks while simultaneously putting the brakes on global warming.

Wallmann and his colleagues base their theories on a reaction scientists noticed more than a decade ago. When a certain amount of pressure is applied to the cage-like crystal structure, carbon dioxide can penetrate the layer of ice, at which point it displaces the methane. Then a new cage of frozen water molecules forms around the carbon dioxide. "This behavior has already been demonstrated in laboratory experiments," says Wallmann.

He is also impressed by the ratio at which the gases are exchanged. For each dissolved molecule of methane, up to five molecules of carbon dioxide disappear into the ice cage.