China to Initiate Commercial Natural Gas Hydrate Exploitation

China Geological Survey, an arm of China’s Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), said on August 25 at an energy forum that the experimental operation of China’s water-based methane ice exploitation had attained promising results. With rich land-based and water-based natural gas hydrate (NGH) reservoir, China will further promote the demonstration pilot projects of NGH exploitation in the next phase, aiming massive commercial production as the first of the world in the unconventional natural gas sector.

Last year on May 18, 2017, China successfully started the pilot mining of water-based methane ice in Shenhu waters in the South China Sea, and the whole pilot production lasted for 60 days with production at 309,000 cbm and millions of experiment data, proving the methane ice is capable for green production.

According to MNR’s big plan, China is designing the drilling vessel for NGH. The construction of the ship will start in 2019 and be put into operation by 2020. The government is also preparing industrial policy-makingand matching laws and supervision measures for this brand new field.

Methane clathrate (4CH4·23H2O), also called methane hydrate, hydromethane, methane ice, fire ice, natural gas hydrate, or gas hydrate, is a solid clathrate compound (more specifically, a clathrate hydrate) in which a large amount of methane is trapped within a crystal structure of water, forming a solid similar to ice. The natural deposits widely exist in the oceanic and continental reservoir, and the sedimentary NGH reservoir probably contains 2 to 10 times the currently known reserves of conventional natural gas, as of 2013. Because of the high commercial value, many countries tried to develop the way of massive exploitation, such as the U.S., Canada, Japan, India and South Korea, but the process is not satisfactory due to the high sand inclusion.