In the year 2000, fishermen scooped up the stuff off of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada and hastily dumped the “hissing mass,” an entire ton of it, back into the ocean. The USSR tried unsuccessfully to recover them from permafrost reservoirs in the 1960s and 1970s.  The governments of Japan, South Korea, India, Canada, China, Norway and the USA are all presently interested in figuring out how to take advantage of all of their potential energy. The first intentional commercial exploitation of them may come already by 2015. To date, there has only been one field commercially produced where some of the gas is thought to have been from them – the Messoyakha Gas Field in Russia. 

THEY are the huge reservoirs of methane clathrates worldwide which have gained attention especially from oil-poor countries such as Japan and India. Research into how to use methane clathrates as an energy source has been reinvigorated by the rabid global race to find new sources of energy. In 2006 China announced plans to spend $100 million over 10 years to study natural clathrates (gas hydrates). Already in 2000 the U.S. Senate authorized $47.5 million over five years for the Department of Energy to study them, a bill signed by then-President Clinton.  In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy has had a methane hydrates program since 1997 when it initiated the planning for a multi-agency natural gas hydrate R&D program.   

The New Scientist article Ice on Fire: the Next Fossil Fuel dated June 24, 2009 notes that conservative figures place global reserves at roughly 3 trillion tons of previously untapped carbon - more than is trapped in all the other known fossil fuel reserves put together. Tim Collett, a clathrate specialist at the US Geological Survey estimated in 2007 that there is between 0.7 and 4.4 trillion cubic meters of methane clathrate in Alaska alone…which could heat 100 million homes for a decade. 

Research of methane clathrates are important not only for their potential such as for the U.S. to achieve aggressive economic and environmental goals. This foremost is a cautionary blog entry…

There strong evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown aka the clathrate gun hypothesis, may cause drastic earth environment and atmospheric changes on a number of occasions in the past such as the Permian-Triassic extinction event, when 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct 251 million years ago.