During their three-day meeting last month,
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe again asked US President Barack Obama to
speed up exports of American natural gas to help his beleaguered and
energy-poor economy. But the big energy revolution that could ride to Tokyo's
rescue may not come on tankers from US ports, but rather from deep underneath
the sandy seabed off Japan's own shores.
Methane hydrates, which are chunky packets of
ice that trap huge amounts of natural gas in the form of methane, are looming
ever larger in Japan's plans to meet its needs for energy in the wake of the
Fukushima nuclear disaster and skyrocketing bills for imported fuel.
Other Asian countries facing an energy crunch,
including South Korea, India and China, are also hoping to tap into the
apparently abundant reserves of methane hydrates, also known as "fire ice." That could help
fuel growing economies - but it could also fuel further tensions in regional
seas that are already the stage for geopolitical sabre rattling and brinkmanship
over natural resources.
Totally unknown until the 1960s, methane
hydrates could theoretically store more gas than all the world's conventional
gas fields today. The amount that scientists estimate should be obtainable
comes to about 43,000 trillion cubic feet, or nearly double the 22,800 trillion
cubic feet of technically recoverable traditional natural gas resources around
the world. The United States consumed 26 trillion cubic feet of gas last year.
That raises the possibility of an energy revolution
that could dwarf even the shale gale that has transformed America's fortunes in
a few short years. It could also potentially have big implications for
countries, including the US, Australia, Qatar and even Russia, which are
banking on unbridled growth in the global trade of liquefied natural gas. The
trick will be to figure out exactly how to profitably tap vast deposits of the
stuff buried inside the sea floor.
Enormous
potential
"There's no doubt that the resource
potential is enormous," says Michael Stoppard, managing director, global
gas, at energy consultancy IHS. "I think it's the ultimate rebuttal to the
peak oil and peak gas concept, but of course that's not much good unless you
can develop it."
To that end, this month a 499-tonne survey
vessel nosed out of the port of Sakai, once home to fabled gunsmiths and the
finest makers of samurai swords in medieval Japan and today the prospective
launching pad for a new technological revolution.
For the next two months, the Kaiyo Maru No 7
will survey the sea floor off Japan's west coast, the first step in a
years-long process that could end with significant production of natural gas in
Japanese waters. A promising methane hydrate site off the southeast coast was
the subject of earlier surveys.
Japan is the epicentre of methane hydrates today
not because it has so much of the resource - quite the opposite, most methane
hydrates appear to be in North America - but because it needs the resource so
badly and is working faster than any other country to make fire ice a
commercial proposition.
The US and Canada are awash in methane hydrate
resources, found both under the seabed such as in the Gulf of Mexico and in
sub-Arctic permafrost. But both countries also have huge reserves of
conventional and shale gas, dampening industry enthusiasm for a complicated,
lengthy research process.
Although some companies, such as Chevron, work
alongside the US government on methane hydrate research, "there's a little
less space in the industry for enabling field experiments and data collection
than there was 10 years ago," says Ray Boswell, technology manager for
methane hydrates at the US Energy Department's National Energy Technology
Laboratory.
Not so in Japan. This spring, researchers in
Japan reached a technical breakthrough, figuring out exactly how the gassy
bundles of ice release 160 times their volume in methane as they are taken out
of low-temperature, high-pressure environments. That could make commercial
extraction, which experts estimate is at least 10 to 15 years off, an easier
proposition. Continue reading…
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