dissident wrote:They got a steady stream of gas but the fundamental problem of low density remains. Some numbers would have quickly put all of this into context. You need to harvest a layer distributed over thousands of square kilometers. The volume of gas per unit area is not that large. Also, unlike fracked wells or conventional wells you are not going to have the gas flow concentrated into one well head with any commercially viable quantity. So a mobile gas harvester operation is needed which is nothing like existing gas field development but a seafloor mining operation.
Clathrates are formed on the slopes of continental shelves which are unstable locations for seabed disruption. The article quotes people saying that this development is still a long way away. There are show-stopping reasons for this and once again the media does a disservice by not addressing them. No wonder people have the impression that things will work out fine. Technological and resource problems are not presented, just techno-cornucopian expectations of a utopian future.
If you follow the link to the original article you will see they are working on tundra land sub permafrost clathrates, not sea floor clathrates. It seems to me that with multi branch recovery wells and whatever stimulation injection wells they are testing the process should yield results conceptually the same as the tight shale/sand gas being extracted with the new fracking techniques. In this case they are using a different method to release the gas than fracking, which does nothing for methane hydrates, but the recovery technology for the multi branch wells is already well developed. Russia and the USSR before them had some success extracting these kind of hydrates with simple two well systems where they injected steam or heated water in one well to melt the hydrates deep under ground and extract the resulting liquid for surface processing. In another example I have read about they pulled a vacuum on the extraction well causing the hydrates to destabilize and liquify for extraction.
I certainly agree that some numbers and costs would have been a big help, if it costs $10/MMU to get the clathrate gas out then it won't compete with other sources for a very long time, if on the other hand it costs $3 then it is competitive now.