The Ice that Burns Found Beneath the Sea

October 25, 2009 · Filed Under Current, Lore of the Sea 

conbustibleiceI did a double take.  The headline read  -  “China’s exploration vessel for combustible ice delivered.”  China just spent $59 million dollars building a deep-sea exploration ship to explore for “combustible ice.”  The article went on to say, “China announced in 2007 to have successfully excavated combustible ice, a kind of natural gas hydrate, under the South China Sea, making the country the fourth after the United States, Japan and India to succeed in the field.Combustible ice is regarded as a potential source of alternative energy to coal and oil. One cubic meter of combustible ice can release 164 cubic meters of natural gas.”  

I had never heard of “combustible ice”.   It turns out that “gas hydrates,” a frozen form of natural gas that bursts into flames at the touch of a match, have been discovered in large quantities under the South China Sea, the Gulf of Mexico,  in the Atlantic in deep water off the Carolinas  and in permafrost on the North Slope.   Large deposits of “combustible ice” have also been located off the coast of India and in Canada’s Mackenzie Delta. Some estimates suggest that the ”total energy conserved in combustible ice is 2-3 times as much as that contained in coal, petroleum, and natural gas found in the world.” 

Extracting the methane from combustible ice is currently very expensive, about eight times the cost of natural gas exploitation. (Natural gas is primarily methane.)  Costs are expected to decline as new techniques are developed to process the ice.  On the other hand there is considerable concern about the release of methane into the atmosphere as it is a far more destructive green-house gas than carbon dioxide.  The good news, however, is that burning methane/natural gas produces half the CO2 of burning coal and 30% less than burning oil, as well as far lower levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, ash and mercury.

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