Just stumbled across an article from January about methane clathrate mining off the South Carolina coast.
Mitchell Colgan isn't so sure. Colgan is a College of Charleston geology professor who formerly worked in exploration research for Shell Oil Co.
"The problem you face is how much money you pay for that lease," he said. Shell Oil paid more than a half billion dollars for a lease off Alaska more than two decades ago, but that was in an area rich with beds that also could be claimed by Russia. Those hydrates are much closer to shore than those off South Carolina.
Also, oil companies would be more attracted to abundant methane hydrate beds in locations like Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico, where some of the recovery infrastructure and equipment already is in place, Colgan said. Off South Carolina, you would be starting from scratch, to go after a supply not expected to be nearly as plentiful as other locations.
"There would be good reasons for Japan to try to get it," Colgan said, but even with the recent success there, the companies still haven't solved the problem of how to get at enough of the gas safely enough to make it cost-beneficial.
"If you solve that problem, then you go where it's closer to shore," he said. On the Blake Plateau, "all the hydrates are on the slope, a tremendously unstable area."
But Charter insists "it's not paranoid at all" to think (oil companies) are interested. In the Gulf of Mexico, companies for years avoided drilling deep ocean oil wells because of the methane hydrate beds, the depth and distance from shore, and danger. Now they are drilling in areas like Deepwater Horizon.
"The bottom line is methane hydrates aren't ready for prime time," he said, but the technology and need might be only 10, 12, 15 years away. In other words, the Blake beds might be harvestable within the time span of the life of the lease.
'Dirty little secret'
Very little is known about the environmental concerns of going after methane hydrate, Charter said. What is known is that "as currently conducted, it's extremely dangerous."
The extraction process differs from fracking, the problematic and controversial gas extraction now underway onshore. But it's similar in that hydraulic fracturing injects fluid underground at great pressure, while methane hydrates already are under pressure.
Fracking is not particularly efficient, injecting huge volumes of water and potentially polluting groundwater supplies. A "dirty little secret" about fracking is that it burns off about 50 percent of the natural gas that could be recovered, Charter said.
In South Carolina, the methane hydrates pot is actively being boiled by federal and state legislators pushing bills to promote offshore exploration and drilling, citing the potential revenue. But state waters end 3 miles off the coast; the beds, of course, are a lot farther out. Federal rules specify that royalties in those regions are paid to the federal government, not the states.
State legislators "think that somehow or another somewhere they will be able to rewrite federal law to reap some royalties. That's a pipe dream. Residents are being sold a bill of goods, a red herring, to open the coast (to drilling) and not consider the value of a clean coast to an economy dependent on it," Charter said.
In South Carolina, Colgan said, talking up oil and gas is "a political game that's being played that people are being cute about. There isn't any oil. There isn't any natural gas in our environment."
As for the methane hydrates offshore, "It's almost impossible to get, and if you could get it, you wouldn't get it here. Farther north the ice is closer to the surface," Colgan said.
More at the link
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/2 ... /140109725