courtesy University of Victoria

Canadian and Japanese researchers appear to have unlocked the Holy Grail of energy supply after achieving test flows from a methane gas hydrate just below the seafloor off British Colombia’s McKenzie Delta, some 850 metres beneath the waves.

With BP, Chevron and Japan National Oil Corp. in support, the team at Mallik, B.C. confirmed Wednesday they had successfully disturbed the pressure balance keeping gas molecules trapped in iced water molecules.

"We were able to take conventional technologies, modify them, and produce,” project leader Scott Dallimore of the Geological Survey of Canada told the Canadian Press. The Mallik team flared from ice for six days at rates akin to a coalbed methane well.

The decades long research intensified a few years ago, invigorated this year as part of the international research program called the Polar Year, chaired by Norway. The sustained gas flow happened last month.

Gas hydrate fields line the coasts of every continent, and are said to pack more energy than conventional natural gas for being frozen and compressed. Scientists have long calculated that they contain more energy than all the world’s coal, oil and conventional gas.

In 2002, an expanded consortium with seven international partners undertook a production research well program that included the drilling of 1200 m deep research well. Full-scale field experiments involved over 100 international researchers in an effort to monitor and understand the depressurizing hydates.