Japan to Trial Frozen Gas Output in Pacific in 2012

By Shigeru Sato

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Japan plans to start trial drilling in 2012 to extract frozen natural gas buried under the seabed and test if the methane hydrate is a viable next-generation fuel.

The government will lead test production of the frozen methane in an ocean trench called the Nankai Trough about 30 miles (50 kilometers) off the coast of the country's main Honshu Island, according to a document distributed at a trade ministry panel meeting in Tokyo today. Japan will extend by 2 years a 16- year frozen methane project started in 2001 to find out if the fuel is suitable for commercial production.

Methane hydrate, gas trapped in frozen water buried in sediment some 3,000 feet under the ocean floor, may help Japan win energy independence from the Middle East and Indonesia. The country last year confirmed offshore fields in its waters hold an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet of the gas, equivalent to the Japan's demand for about 14 years.

``The project to exploit our own natural resources is significant as Japan relies heavily on imports of high-priced oil and gas,'' Committee Chairman Kazuo Fujita said during today's meeting. Fujita is also an engineering professor at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo.

Japan has spent about 29 billion yen ($263 million) in the past eight years on developing methane-hydrate technology. Drilling at the Pacific Ocean field will follow test-production this year in the Arctic Circle with Canada. That project has used a depressurizing method in which icy gas crystals are returned to gaseous form inside a drilled hole. Methane hydrate has to be depressurized or heated to be turned back into gas.

U.S. Venture

Japan agreed with the U.S. in June to cooperate on developing ways to produce the gas. The two countries may start test production as early as next year, according to the trade ministry document. Alaska is a possible location, it said.

Japan probably has several more undersea deposits of methane hydrate, such as the one near Sado Island in the Sea of Japan, according to a study conducted by the trade ministry's methane hydrate research committee.

Before it can consider commercial production, Japan has to tackle the environmental hazards posed by methane hydrate. Any extraction has to ensure that methane, a gas blamed for global warming, doesn't escape into the atmosphere, the document shows. The project team has been developing detectors to monitor leaks.

``Methane gas bubbles were already found to be rising from the ocean floor in the Nanaki Trough,'' Ryo Matsumoto, a panel member and University of Tokyo scientist, said today. ``How can we differentiate between the bubbles that are rising by themselves and those that are leaked by our project?''

Matsumoto, who has studied frozen gas since 1987, has warned that landslides on the ocean floor must be avoided when drilling into the continental shelf.

To contact the reporter on this story: Shigeru Sato in Tokyo at ssato10@bloomberg.net.