Playing with fire: if it can he recovered economically, a mysterious ice that burns may prove to he the source of much of the energy needed to primer the future.

According to some scientists, fishing trawler captain Brian Dickens is lucky to be alive. Dickens was fishing in almost 3,000 feet of water off the southwest coast of Vancouver Island in July of 2001 when he and his crew started to retrieve their deep-water net. Suddenly, without warning, the net rocketed up out of the depths and into the air, accompanied by a surreal hissing sound. "I've been fishing since I was 15," an astonished Captain Dickens said, according to Canada's National Post. "And I can tell you I've never seen anything like it, or even heard about anything like it. I'll never forget it ... the net came shooting out of the water with such force, it was quite phenomenal."

Dickens and his crew had snared an unusual catch: a hissing, steaming, foaming chunk of ... what exactly? Alongside Dickens' trawler the stuff looked like a giant Alka Seltzer tablet. He and his crew knew that the net didn't contain the usual catch of the day. "The engineer and I looked at each other and we didn't know what the h*** was going on," Dickens recalled. "He didn't want to wind it on, and I'm like, 'How else do we find out what it is?' So there was only one choice as far as I was concerned, and that was wind it on ... and so we did."

According to the National Post, "What they saw when they opened the net in the fish tank ... was some 2,300 kilograms of fish and another 2,300 kilos of ice." A Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans observer on board the trawler put some samples of the fizzing mass in plastic bags for later investigation, but the bags promptly swelled and popped.

Samples garnered from the insides of the ruptured bags later solved the mystery of Dickens' catch that day. Inside the bags researchers found remnant molecules of methane. What Dickens and his crew had hauled out of the depths that day was a huge chunk of methane hydrate, a material formed when methane molecules become trapped in a lattice of water ice formed under pressure at cold temperatures. The material can hold colossal amounts of methane gas, and some pointed out that Dickens and his crew were lucky not to have suffocated when the gas was released from its ice prison. "They were very lucky," says Canadian geophysicist Ross Chapman of the University of Victoria's Centre for Earth and Ocean Research. "They're lucky they didn't get poisoned or seriously injured. It could have exploded or it could have suffocated them."

Dickens' near miss off Vancouver Island, though, could be the harbinger of an amazing discovery of an almost unimaginably vast windfall of energy resources. Scientists are beginning to speculate that the Earth may have enough methane (the major component of natural gas) stored in hydrates to provide power to our energy-hungry civilization for literally hundreds of years. But the technology to harness this vast reservoir of fuel is in its infancy. Now, the race is on to find out if methane hydrate can indeed power the future.

The Far North

Less well known than many other major river systems, Canada's Mackenzie River is nonetheless massive and powerful. Arising in Great Slave Lake, North America's deepest lake and itself a "Great Lake" bigger than either Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, the mighty waters of the Mackenzie flow, like a Canadian Mississippi, north where they empty their prodigious load of sediment into the sprawling Mackenzie River Delta, before the river's fresh water dissipates into the Arctic vastness of the Beaufort Sea.

It's a forbidding location. In summer, surprising heat is accompanied by hordes of hungry mosquitoes. Winter turns the region into a frozen wilderness of slashing storms and bitter cold. But winter also makes the area accessible by ice road, and in 2002, in the vast frozen wilderness of the Mackenzie River Delta, a team of scientists unpacked a spindly drilling rig and a few shacks' worth of equipment and began to drill. The objective: find a way to extract methane from the vast gas-hydrate field below the delta.

The Mallik gas-hydrate field was discovered under the delta in 1971 and 1972 when the Imperial Oil Company drilled a test well on the site. According to Natural Resources Canada, subsequent exploration established "the Mallik gas-hydrate field as one of the most concentrated gas-hydrate reservoirs in the world." The location of the field, even though it is in the far, inaccessible, and inhospitable Arctic, makes the site relatively useful for testing methane-hydrate extraction methods. Most other promising gas-hydrate fields are deep under the Earth's oceans.

Extracting methane hydrate from the gas-hydrate fields is a delicate and highly experimental business. Methane is a gas at temperatures above -258 degrees Fahrenheit, and only a combination of cold and pressure keeps it locked in the water ice lattice of methane hydrate. Raise the temperature just a bit, and the gas escapes. By the same token, relieving the pressure just a bit also causes the gas to escape. And, methane hydrate is often widely dispersed, making it difficult to recover on a large scale. As a result, getting substantial amounts of the gas out of the cold, deep pockets in which it is found has not been easy.

That's where the work at Mallik comes in. Beginning with the 2002 expedition, researchers at Mallik were able to extract quantities of the gas from the deep pockets beneath the delta. The amount recovered was not enough for commercial use, but the extraction demonstrated the feasibility, for the first time, of two methods of extraction. After the results of the Mallik study were released in 2003, the Vancouver Sun reported: "The $25-million test project was able to produce an uninterrupted flow of natural gas from the frozen deposit for a period of five days," with a maximum flow of 1,500 cubic meters per day. While that's not enough for commercial production, the test demonstrated the feasibility of tapping into reserves of methane hydrate.

A Fuel for the Future?

The success at Mallik may have been the first step in putting methane hydrate in reach of commercial production. And commercial production holds the promise of making natural gas from methane hydrate the most important hydrocarbon fuel of the future.

The potential impact of this fuel source can be inferred from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of methane hydrate. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, "The worldwide amounts of carbon bound in gas hydrates is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth." How much is that? According to Popular Mechanics, "100,000 to 300 million trillion cu. ft. (tcf) of methane exists globally in hydrate form." By contrast, according to NaturalGas.org--a website maintained by the Natural Gas Supply Association--the Energy Information Agency estimates there are 1,190.62 trillion cubic feet of recoverable conventional natural gas reserves in the United States. Clearly, recovering even a fraction of the methane stored in gas hydrates would add substantially to the nation's currently strained supply of natural gas.

Within the United States and its territorial areas, potentially important reserves of gas hydrates have been found in a number of areas. The most important may be in Alaska. According to Department of Energy (DOE) scientist Ray Boswell, "The peak of the Gas Hydrates Resource Pyramid (those resources that are closest to potential commercialization) is represented by gas hydrates that exist at high saturations within quality reservoirs rocks under existing Arctic infrastructure. This resource is currently estimated to be in the range of 33 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas-in-place" under Alaska's North Slope. Working together, British Petroleum and the DOE project that 12 trillion cubic feet of this resource is recoverable. Even more is found nearby, but still some distance away from existing infrastructure. According to Boswell, "The current USGS estimate for total North Slope resources is approximately 590 Tcf gas-in-place."

Even larger reserves of methane hydrates are found in offshore locations, but sometimes under thousands of feet of ocean. Promising indications of massive gas-hydrate reserves have, for instance, been noted in areas of the mid-Atlantic outer continental shelf and in the Bering Sea. According to the DOE newsletter Fire in the Ice, Chevron recently supplied scientists with data confirming "the presence of a thick zone of gas-hydrate-saturated sandstone in the Gulf of Mexico," closer to shore.

Another intriguing find in 2003, for which details have only recently been published, came just a few miles off the California coast. There, researchers found a giant "mud volcano" and associated deposits of methane hydrate. The researchers took samples from the volcano, the top of which is the size of a football field. "When the core was opened on the deck of the research ship," the researchers reported, "the intense 'rotten egg' smell of the hydrogen sulfide, which is incorporated in the hydrate ice along with the methane, together with the hissing and sizzling sounds of the vaporizing gas, made everyone scramble to make sure there were no sources that might ignite the gases, all the while gasping for fresh air."

Even though methane hydrates are abundant and contain substantial amounts of potentially recoverable hydrocarbons, the possibility of harnessing this energy windfall remains in doubt, though many remain optimistic. In Japan, it is hoped that that nation's perpetual energy problems can be cured by bringing methanehydrate production online within 15 years. In the United States, others are even more optimistic. According to the DOE's Ray Boswell, "Commercially viable production is definitely realistic within a decade. The world is investing in hydrates, and one reason for us to do this is to maintain our leadership position in this emerging technology."

Despite the promise represented by gas hydrates, their viability as a commercial resource remains speculative. At present almost all research into recovering gas-hydrate reserves is funded by government largesse. Private enterprise may not be in a hurry to tap the resource for economic reasons. Development of techniques to access the potential resource is still in the early stages and, with the exception of the methane-hydrate deposits under Alaska's North Slope, most other deposits are located away from existing infrastructure. Access to the resource, therefore, would require an expensive combination of research and development and infrastructure construction. That, combined with the degree of uncertainty that still remains over the feasibility of large-scale commercial production from gas hydrates, means most energy companies will likely continue to concentrate on traditional sources of natural gas until prices for natural-gas supplies increase enough to offset the uncertainties that surround hydrates.

Still, gas hydrates represent a resource whose potential is too large to ignore. "The quantities are there," Miriam Kastner, a geochemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told Popular Mechanics. "Whether or not it can be an energy source depends on how it is distributed. That's what we're trying to find out."