Japan, China have extracted methane hydrate from the seafloor

Enlarge / A photo from the China Geological Survey. The researchers extracted methane hydrate from the bottom of the South China Sea. (credit: China Geological Survey)

This month, teams from Japan and China have successfully extracted methane hydrate, a hydrocarbon gas trapped in a structure of water molecules, off the seafloor. The substance looks like ice but can be set on fire, and it's energy-dense-one cubic meter of methane hydrate can contain 160 cubic meters of gas.

This makes searching for methane hydrate an attractive research project for several countries. According to the Department of Energy, methane hydrates are abundant on the seafloor and under permafrost, and they contain "perhaps more organic carbon that all the world's oil, gas, and coal combined."

Such vast reserves of fossil fuels are untapped because of how difficult it is to extract them. As a 2012 post from the Energy Information Agency (EIA) stated, until recently, methane hydrates "provided more problems than solutions." Preventing their formation around deepwater oil and gas drilling operations has been a crucial part of planning ocean wells. The "ice" substance that contains the gas generally can't just be picked up off the seafloor because it disintegrates outside of its high-pressure environment. The South China Morning Post wrote that current extraction efforts involve machinery "to depressurize or melt [the methane hydrate] on the sea bed and channel the gas to the surface."

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