Slashdot Mirror
Undersea Deposits of Frozen Methane Found
geoswan writes "The CBC is running a story about large deposits of
Frozen methane off the
coast of Vancouver Island .
The deposits may be 850 meters deep. The story doesn't say how the methane came to be a
solid. Pressure? The story doesn't address what technology could be used to mine these deposits,
if the decision is made to develop these resources. The CBC showed pictures taken of the methane
hydrate. Sure enough, it looked like a big snowbank. It is an environmentally sensitive area. So, how about it, should it be exploited?"
It's not actually frozen methane as such. The freezing point of methane is much too cold for that. It's a clathrate essentially a form of ice with methane molecules trapped among the water molecules. It's stable at temperatures just above the normal freezing point of water, and high pressures. If the pressure is released (for example by bringing it to the surface) it decomposes into water and methane gas.
It doesn't matter who owns it right now...because with current mining and salvage technology, that deposit of hydrates is a liability and nothing more. Right now, there's no way of safely and efficiently getting all that gas from the bottom of the ocean. If you went down there and hit a big chunk of that stuff with a pick axe, you'd risk setting off a chain reaction that could lead to a catastrophic explosion (no kidding...I wrote a research paper on methane hydrates for my degree) that could spell disaster for the whole world...(methane is about 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2)...or at the very least kill everyone at the site either by suffocation or fireball. Even if you gently try to scoop the stuff up and bring it to the surface, it will decompose on the way up and either suffocate everyone at the site or ignite and burn everyone to death. There's been several times already where an oil derrick was engulfed in flames because the hydrates around the site became unstable, bubbled to the surface and met up with a happy spark.
The point of all this informative rant: hydrates hold the world's most ginourmous amount of natural gas--but if you mess with it with current technology, you can release it all at once and really screw the earth up.