Burning ice - a new energy revolution?

Japanese scientists have successfully extracted new energy from ice fire (burnt ice). This is a plentiful source of material distributed on the oceans and ice covered areas. This success opens up new directions of development on the path to find alternative energy sources that are hurting scientists in the past.

>>>Japan exploits natural gas from burnt ice

The burning ice containing methane hydrate and gas hydrate exists in solid form, formed from natural gas and water under low temperature and high pressure conditions: yellow, red, gray, blue .

Arrows hit two targets

Before being made into gas, marine methane is considered a "slow-detonating bomb" because if it escapes into the environment, it will increase the greenhouse effect, which can cause the earth to warm up 21 times higher. with carbon dioxide (CO ₂ ). "Conquering" methane, means achieving two goals, not to mention creating a lot of jobs, minimizing dangerous environmental incidents compared to producing energy from atoms. The World Energy Agency (IEA) has many programs to support countries to survey and exploit methane hydrates.

JOGMEC exploits methane hydrates off Japan

Last March, Japan National Petroleum - Metal Group (JOGMEC) successfully extracted fire ice from the continental shelf with high methane content. However, the current difficulty in producing methane is that the high cost of methane hydrate exists in solid form, so it is necessary to apply complicated and expensive technology. JOGMEC's ​​methane hydrate mining project must apply very complex technology. JOGMEC successfully extracted methane hydrate from a depth of 300m, nearly 80km from the shore in the Atsumi Peninsula, Japan. The scientists reduced the pressure of methane hydrates to help separate methane from the burnt ice and collect the gas.

Prospects for Asian countries

With this initial success, Japan hopes to improve its energy shortages, especially after the double disaster of earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear power plant incidents. Some other countries such as China, Norway, Russia, New Zealand, Germany, Brazil, Chile, South Korea, Canada, India and the US have studied this issue but only Japan has successfully extracted it.

Japan is expected to commercialize methane gas in 2018 with the desire to gradually exit the energy crisis. Up to this point, Japan is the world's leading importer of LNG liquefied gas, the third in oil imports.

India is also very interested in this source of energy and has had a methane hydrate research program since 1997. By 2006, the first joint venture between the US and India was launched to exploit methane gas in the Andamam island region, the bay. Mahanadi Godavari and many other places of India. According to the survey results, the volume of methane hydrate in India is very large, doubling oil and gas. If successful, the second most populous country in the world will reduce considerable energy pressure because India is currently importing huge quantities of coal, oil and natural gas.