Introducing 'Fire Ice,' the Huge Energy Resource China and US Are Investigating
Scientists have been fascinated by it for decades, but how can its power be harnessed safely?
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The B.C. government is trying to sell natural gas to China, but the Chinese already have "fire ice," wrote Crawford Kilian recently in the Tyee. The Chinese have been looking at fire ice for at least a decade, and might consider using it as a way to transition away from fossil fuels before switching to renewable energy sources.
But what is fire ice, anyway? Fire ice is also known as methane clathrate or methane hydrate. It's an ice-like compound that forms in seabeds and permafrost, and can trap a lot of methane. But fire ice is also unstable, and "the warming atmosphere and ocean tend to melt the ice and free the methane, accelerating the pace of global warming," writes Kilian.
There's fire ice off China's Pearl River delta, but there's also a lot under the Gulf of Mexico, and the U.S. Department of Energy has funded a $58-million project to study it.
This 2014 video from the University of Texas at Austin, which is leading the project, shows experts' fascination with the compound and their thoughts on fire ice's potential impact on the environment and the economy.
"This stuff is cool," says one researcher. "[It's got] 250 years worth of gas; given our present consumption rates in the United States."