"Green Options: Fuel"-Under the Sea
Friday, May 16, 2008SUSIE GHARIB: With gas prices sky high, all this week we've been focusing on alternative fuel sources. Tonight we head to Japan, where scientists have found a trove of frozen methane gas deposits in the seas surrounding the country. As we wrap up our series "Green Options: Fuel," Lucy Craft says scientists are trying to figure out how to get the fuel out of the ground safely.
LUCY CRAFT, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: It's been dubbed fire and ice. Rightly so. This burning chunk of ice is actually frozen gas, an unconventional energy source called methane hydrate. Sea beds across the planet are riddled with seams of methane hydrate, especially around the geologically unstable islands of Japan. It was a colony of snow crabs in the Sea of Japan which tipped off University of Tokyo scientist Ryo Matsumoto to a bubbling trove of methane hydrate. The gassy areas support bacteria upon which the shelled scavengers feed. Matsumoto says his modest find is just tip of the methane iceberg.
RYO MATSUMOTO, PROF., EARTH & PLANETARY SCIENCE, UNIV. OF TOKYO: This could be, literally become huge natural resources (INAUDIBLE) different government is (INAUDIBLE) They're leading this expeditions, this (INAUDIBLE).
CRAFT: Japan's richest trough of methane hydrate lies just south of its main island. Sadao Nagakubo, a spokesman for the state-funded methane research team reckons frozen gas could eventually supply as much as a fifth of Japan's energy needs.
TRANSLATION OF: SADAO NAGAKUBO, JAPAN OIL, GAS & METALS NATIONAL CORP.: Methane can replace our imports of regular natural gas. This won't solve all of our fuel problems, but the effect would be significant.
CRAFT: It's a tantalizing proposition for Japan, a country with virtually no natural resources. It's surrounded on all sides by the world's richest reserves of methane hydrate. But unlocking that gas from beneath the sea bed will not only be costly. It could trigger environmental catastrophe.
MATSUMOTO: Increasing the amount of methane in the atmosphere may cause the greenhouse, the global warming, because methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas.
CRAFT: A greater concern say scholars like Matsumoto is the potential for triggering landslides and tsunamis because of the disturbance to ocean sediments. But dazzled by the potential Eldorado just off its coast, the Japanese government is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out how to safely extract frozen gas. For his part, government spokesman Nagakubo scoffs a theories that drilling for frozen gas could unleash environmental Armageddon.
NAGAKUBO: There's a lot of myth about possible catastrophes. Actually, our biggest hurdle isn't environmental, but financial. Since methane hydrate is a solid, unlike oil and gas. It resists melting, so lowering the pressure in the ice sheet is probably the most efficient extraction method.
CRAFT: The roadblocks are staggering. Japan is racing to commercialize methane hydrate production within a decade. It would be a dream come true for this energy-hungry, fuel-poor nation. Lucy Craft, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Tokyo.
