Discovery News finds a strange new source of energy – gas hydrates, solid chunks of frozen natural gas better known as combustible ice:
In China, the deposit is in a high, frozen plateau, but many are in marine sediments. Last summer American scientists on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico drilled exploratory holes to look for gas hydrates buried deep in the sand. They discovered pockets of highly concentrated gas hydrate–examples of a deposit type that is estimated to hold 6,700 trillion cubic feet of the gas in that area alone.
“A lot of people think of it as unstable,” says U.S. Department of Energy’s methane hydrate R&D manager Ray Boswell. “It’s not particularly volatile.” Boswell points out that we’d actually have to work to pull it across a phase boundary, so extraction means melting the solid substance into its water and methane gas components underground.