Methane ice worms hanging out on a methane hydrate aggregate in the Gulf of Mexico. Via the NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program
Deep under the Arctic's frosty seas lies a massive energy prize: billions of tons of methane hydrates. Climate scientists have long discussed the incredible climate-warming potential those deposits of frozen natural gas have if they ever melt, and a recent report from a trio of researchers says the climate costs of melting methane hydrate could rival the size of the entire global economy. But while debate continues over those claims, it's becoming ever clearer that oil companies will attempt to extract those hard-to-reach deposits.
According to a commentary in Nature that's made the rounds, those huge methane reserves are a "ticking timebomb." Methane hydrates form as gases crystallize under the intense pressure and low temperatures at the bottom of oceans. Because methane is a very strong greenhouse gas, if those deposits melt, our climate would likely warm quickly.
That back-of-the-napkin conclusion has been discussed before, but the Dutch and British researchers writing in Nature attempt to put some numbers to the potential phenomenon. They calculate that, if methane hydrate reserves melt—caused by warmer oceans, which will warm further with more methane in the atmosphere, and on and on—the resulting climate effects would cost the global economy $60 trillion. With global GDP somewhere around $71 trillion, that massive number was enough to make headlines all over the place. (Reuters' story is a good example.)
A fair number of science writers took issue with that claim, with the leading counterargument being that the Nature authors seemed to calculate what would happen if all the methane hydrate in the world melted really quickly, and then extrapolated the cost of that massive climate change potential based on studies of the comparatively-gradual change we're experiencing now. Charlie Petit has a good breakdown of the kerfluffle at the KSJ Tracker, and Jason Samenow's piece at the Washington Post appears to be the top rebuttal.
If you must know, I'm in the skeptic camp simply because it's not clear how quickly methane hydrates could melt. There's no denying that their melting would have costly climate effects, but as Samenow and others argue, the $60 trillion figure is very much a worst case scenario, and may not be realistic.
Still, there's another side to the story: those millions of tons of natural gas represent a potential energy boom that could rival America's current fracking explosion.
Japan is currently leading the charge, which comes as no surprise, as the country has at least 10 years' worth of proven reserves off its coasts and natural gas prices that are four times higher than in the US. As of right now, methane hydrate extraction remains incredibly costly and fairly theoretical, but a successful Japanese extraction test in March led the country to state it would try to have viable extraction operations by 2023.
That decade timetable is tight, but Japan's not alone. According to a big report in the Wall Street Journal, India and China are also heavily interested in exploiting methane hydrates to help feed their huge energy demands. (Those energy needs have also fueled Chinese and Indian interest in alternative energy sources like thorium.) Currently, costs remain high—the Journal pegs methane hydrate extraction at somewhere between $30 and $60 per million BTUs, while in the US natural gas is $4 per million BTUs—but experiments are ongoing in Asia and North America.
In fact, oil giant ConocoPhillips has already run a successful test in Alaska with the US Energy Department, which utilized a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen injection to release methane hydrates from a well.
It may end up being in the Siberian Arctic that methane hydrates could prove most tantalizing to oil companies. Drilling in the Arctic is incredibly expensive, but that's changing. As fossil fuels get harder to find and as the Arctic melts, the cost-benefit ratio of drilling in the Arctic has become more attractive for oil giants like Russia's Rosneft.
And with Rosneft recently locking down the billions in funding it needed to start drilling the Siberian fields it's spent years acquiring, a methane hydrate boom may not be far off.
While it's still not clear if methane hydrate extraction will ever be cost-effective enough to be worthwhile, especially in the middle of a natural gas boom, the amount of interest over reserves worldwide suggest that someone will crack the puzzle.