Methane discovered in Bay of Bengal not commercially viable

THE rich methane field recently discovered in the Bay of Bengal, which had raised a lot of hope, could not be commercially viable in the near future, a lead US scientist involved with the project has said.

A team of scientist searching for energy resources off the Indian coasts had recently discovered a pair of methane hydrates reservoirs buried in the sediment below the Bay of Bengal, with one of them being near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

My gut feeling is that this is commercially not viable as we do not have the technology to extract gas from such a source. It can at the most at present be considered as potential energy only, Marta Torres, an eminent marine geochemist told The Indian Express in an interview.

An Associate Professor at the State University of Oregon, Torres recently returned from India after a few months of survey off the Indian coast. The ambitious project that was funded by India involved some 40 scientists from India, Canada, the US and Britain. The project was coordinated by Timothy Collett from the US Geological Survey.

Gas hydratesmethane in this caseare crystalline substances, which look like packed snow, or ice. They form when water and methane are combined at high pressure and low temperature. These are generally found along the continental margins. These are created from natural gas, which occurs after decomposition of organic material deep within ocean sediments.

One of the intriguing things about methane hydrate as an energy source, Torres noted, is that in some situations it could be renewable at a much faster rate than other fossil fuels, although still in a time scale long enough to be formidable.