Methane hydrate deposits in the country?

State-owned Japan Oil, Gas & Metals National Corp. revealed March 12 that it produced gas in the world’s first offshore test to extract the fuel known as methane hydrate which is trapped in ice below the seabed off the  east coast  of Japan. It will be joined by  Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC), India’s biggest energy explorer, to try to produce the fuel, according to two officials at the regulator Directorate General of Hydrocarbons.

Methane hydrate?

For the average person, this potential source of unlimited fuel is virtually unknown and most energy planners may not have heard of it or it is not on their radar screens. But that situation would not last long.

 Methane hydrate, known in chemistry as methane clathrate, is an ice-like solid composed of  a methane molecule surrounded by several molecules of water.  Methane hydrates form under the low temperatures and high pressures of the ocean floor, usually at depths greater than about 575 meters, at the underlying sediments to about 225 m and  beneath Arctic permafrost.

It was first discovered off the coast of Guatemala during a deep drilling project in 1982 and remained a scientific curiosity for years until  the late 1990s when sufficient number of similar deposits have been detected or discovered and its possibility as a source of energy has been raised.

The catch is, there is no technology that could commercially extract the resource. The joint effort of the two companies attempts to prove that it could be done.

In the laboratory and pilot scale, extraction procedures have been tested and some of these look promising. The obvious method is depressurization to release methane from the lattice. But the biggest stumbling block is how to control the process since the hydrate exists under high pressure, and rapid depressurization could lead to catastrophic blow outs. An alternative suggestion is to displace the methane from the ice lattice using another gas such as waste carbon dioxide.

The possibility that the resource can be harnessed may have been unwittingly discovered by the Russians as early as 1970. In the  Messoyakha gas field of western Siberia,  Russian engineers were pumping natural gas from beneath the permafrost and piping it  across the wasteland to a large metal smelter. By the end of the decade, they ought to have exhausted the gas supply based on standard scientific estimates. But, lo and behold! The gas keeps on flowing, even up to the present. They thought that they have tapped a hidden reservoir beneath the identified field. However, exhaustive experiments revealed that the gas was seeping from the permafrost above. Now it is inferred that the field is in fact tapping a methane hydrate reservoir.

The current estimates of the volume of deposits discovered or inferred boggles the mind. Suffice is it to say that the quoted amount far more exceeds the total hydrocarbon deposits in the world. If only a fraction of it could be harnessed, the world would become self-sufficient in fuel energy. That's why the New Scientist online magazine dubbed it the next fossil fuel.

For this country, what is intriguing that in the updated map shown below (courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey) of known or inferred methane hydrate deposits, the Philippines has been identified to have at least one. Based on the pressure and temperature regions of stability of this material, the country would have enormous potential.

It doesn't hurt if our researchers and energy planners look ahead into the future and examine the possibilities from methane hydrate.

Japan is showing the way.