Deep sea methane: Energy Saviour Or Impending Disaster?

In December 2003, an international team of geologists announced that they had successfully tapped a new energy source.

Methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas bound into ice, lurks under the seafloor along the margins of every continent and under the Arctic permafrost.

On the Mackenzie River delta in the Canadian Northwest Territories, engineers drilled hundreds of meters below the permafrost into the hydrate deposits.

They punched fractures into the layers of sediment and pumped hot water into the earth, releasing the natural gas from its icy prison.

This first harvest of methane hydrate could mark a new direction for the energy industry. Engineers once assumed that the energy costs of melting the frozen fuel would outweigh the gains but rising oil and gas prices and creative uses of existing technology, like the recent test in the Canadian Arctic, are beginning to change their minds.

The United States Geological Survey estimates that the total amount of natural gas in methane hydrates surpasses all of the known oil, coal, and gas deposits on Earth in energy content, although only a fraction of the frozen fuel will be extractable.

The hydrates can form at any latitude on Earth if temperature and pressure conditions are right, and are usually mixed with sediment under the ocean floor.

There is a catch, however. Methane hydrates offer the energy industry dangers as well as opportunities, warns Charlie Paull, a geochemist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif.

Deep-sea drilling operations that melt seafloor deposits of the icy fuel might set off an underwater accident under certain circumstances.