After six weeks of mining operations near the Pearl River estuary in the South China Sea, according to Xinhua News, China has now extracted approximately 235,000 cubic metres of the combustible ice.
The announcement comes after China together with Japan first extracted the new fossil fuel in May. “China has beaten expectations in completing the trial explorations of combustible ice using local innovations in technology and engineering [this] marks a historic breakthrough”, according to a statement released by the mining site in the Shenhu area of the South China Sea.
China has been commended by its efforts to extract combustible ice from the sea by Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, saying that “China takes once again the leadership” noting that China is number one in terms of the “wind, number one in terms of the solar and number one in terms of the energy-efficiency effort as well as in nuclear power”, as reported by Xinhua news.
China began research on combustible ice in the late 90s and has been working toward a successful extraction since then. Additional, joint efforts made between China, Japan and Australia are also yielding results in the fields of shale gas and coal bed methane.
Water and concentrated natural gas frozen together is what makes combustible ice (methane hydrate). One cubic meter of combustible ice is said to be equal to 164 cubic meters of regular natural gas. It is in high demand since it is flammable and considered to be one of the world’s most abundant fuel sources.
Speaking with Motherboard, the tech and science arm of Vice, Professor Maurice Dusseault from the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at Waterloo University, summated, “Natural gas has an important role to play in the transition from our fossil fuel heavy energy industry to some point in the future where we are carbon-lite”.
