Japan starts test frozen gas production under seabed

PanARMENIAN.Net - Japan, which imports almost all its energy, produced gas in the world’s first tests to extract the fuel from methane hydrate deposits under the seabed, Japan Oil, Gas & Metals National Corp. said in an e-mailed statement, according to Bloomberg.

Gas was produced during drilling today in the Nankai Trough about 50 kilometers (31 miles) off the coast of the country’s main Honshu island, the government-affiliate known as JOGMEC said.

Deposits of methane hydrate, known as “burnable ice,” may be large enough to supply the country’s natural gas needs for about 100 years, according to JOGMEC. The government plans to develop technology to enable commercial use by fiscal 2018.

“Methane hydrate may start a revolution in Japan as shale gas did in the U.S., but there are still a lot of challenges ahead,” said Yuji Morita, a senior researcher at the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.

Eastern Nankai Trough deposits of methane hydrate, or natural gas locked in an ice-like cage of water molecules, may hold the equivalent of about 40 trillion cubic feet of methane, a primary element of natural gas, JOGMEC said in the statement. That’s equivalent to about eleven years of Japan’s LNG imports, it said.

The vessel Chikyu drilled into the seabed off Atsumi Peninsula, central Japan, to extract the gas from methane hydrate deposits 300 meters below the ocean floor at a depth of about 1,000 meters, the trade and industry ministry said.

In 2008, JOGMEC extracted gas from methane hydrate in permafrost in northern Canada. It was the world’s first continuous and stable gas production from methane hydrate sediments, according to the company.