Blue Flame Bounty: Going deep under the ocean floor

Natural gas: Clean, affordable, reliable and safe

As a fuel, natural gas is overflowing with possibility . . . and versatility.

It’s an abundant, low-cost, clean-burning source of energy. It’s reliable and efficient, with a well-established delivery infrastructure.

And it’s an essential player in a lower-carbon future—replacing coal for electricity generation, providing low-emissions home heating, promoting growth in renewables by addressing intermittency issues.

In this fifth chapter of our Blue Flame Bounty series, we look at gas hydrates, a vast untapped natural gas resource generally found deep under the ocean’s floor.

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Low temperature, high pressure

Gas hydrates, also known as methane hydrates, exist where methane is frozen in ice.

Generally speaking, hydrates are found either on submarine continental slopes or in deep ocean floor sediment, where pressure and temperature conspire to form these compounds.

Gas hydrates are formed when methane is frozen in the molecular structure of ice. But because there is no chemical bonding between the two substances, they can be separated with relative ease.

When warmed or depressurized, these hydrates change back to water and natural gas.

Playing hard-to-get

It’s estimated that the earth’s hydrate reserves are greater than all the combined known reserves of crude oil, natural gas and coal.

However, recovering gas hydrates is far from simple. The gas, volatile by nature, will expand as it rises to the surface, moving from a high-pressure to a low-pressure environment. Nearly all of the earth’s hydrate reserves are also in the Arctic, where new drilling was recently banned by both the United States and Canada.

Accordingly, the only methane production from hydrates to date has occurred during small-scale field experiments.

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