Vast Stores of Methane Under Ocean Floor May Provide New Energy Source

American scientists said Wednesday that they had found a tantalizing new energy source in vast stores of methane locked beneath the ocean floor. They report in Nature that they found a reservoir of methane in the form of a solid gas hydrate equivalent to about 15 billion tons of carbon at Blake Ridge in the Western Atlantic.

Underneath that, to their surprise, they found as much or more methane in the form of gas bubbles amid the sediment. “The 35 billion tons of methane carbon on the Blake Ridge . . . could meet the 1996 United States natural gas consumption rate for the next 105 years,” said Gerald Dickens of the University of Michigan. Theoretically, methane in hydrate form could be used as natural gas, but industry does not yet have a way to get the methane out of the earth in a usable form.