Gas Hydrate Essay

Gas Hydrates are a crystalline solid formed of water and gas, the gas is mostly methane. It looks and acts much like ice. It is important to study gas hydrate because it is a potential source of energy for human survival in the future as there is a critical need for a cleaner and viable source of energy (Sun et al., 2011). .It was earlier speculated that gas hydrate is only found in space but later research showed that it can be found on almost every continent on the earth (Mongillo, 2011). Gas hydrates are usually found near oil and natural gas reservoirs, they have a potential to clog and destroy pipelines and machinery therefore in the past they were only studies for safety reasons in the oil industry. Gas hydrates used to form when natural gas was transported on a larger scale, this caused high pressure which formed gas hydrate and clogged the pipelines (Arora, 2015 . Methane extracted from gas hydrate is the simplest fossil fuel, because of its simplicity and lack of additional components, unlike other fuel it does not produce NOx and SOx, The basic equation for the combustion of methane is …show more content…
2014) moreover it produces 43% less carbon than coal. The energy potential of gas hydrate is greater than any other unconventional sources of energy (Arora, 2015). For gas hydrate to become a potential fuel, it is important to extract methane from it, there are 3 major ways to do this one of them is to add hot water to gas hydrate which causes it to break down secondly by drilling into the deposits releases the pressure hence breaking them down into methane and the last one is to inject Carbon Dioxide, injecting carbon dioxide causes a displacement reaction which displaces the methane (Methane hydrate – a new energy source?,