Korea Set to Excavate Burning Ice Resource
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
The Korean government is making efforts to benefit from natural resources laden with potential such as gas hydrates, dubbed "burning ice," at a time when fossil fuel reserves are being rapidly depleted.
The Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE) convened a meeting of related ministries and experts Wednesday in order to discuss how to come up with the best action plan to dig up the resource.
"We confirmed that gas hydrates were present under the sediment of the East Sea in 2007. This year we will check its commercial viability before starting to excavate," ministry official Park Doo-kang said.
"Back then, we estimated that around 600 million tons of gas hydrates were buried in the area. We need to measure the amount of the deposits through a more in-depth study this time around," he said.
If the reserves are confirmed to total 600 million tons, they would be sufficient to meet the country's demand for liquefied national gas (LNG) for three decades.
Gas hydrates are touted as one of the most promising next-generation energy sources because a vast amount of methane, which could be a source of fuel in the future, is trapped within their structures.
They have ingredients similar to those of LNG, which can be used in households for cooking and heating. Some critics are taking issue with the scalability of the gases, though.
Originally, many experts believed that such gasses occurred only in the outer regions of the Solar System, where temperatures were extremely low. But later research revealed that they were massively present in marine sediment on earth.
The sedimentary methane hydrate reservoir is expected to be at least double that of the carbon found in known fossil fuels on the planet.
The ministry predicts that the gases will be commercialized by around 2015.
"Many countries such as the United States, Japan, India and Canada are competing in the research on gas hydrates. In particular, the U.S. and Japan are seemingly ahead of the curve," Park said.
"We are also attempting to garner a competitive edge because the materials are widely thought of as future energy sources although there remain many uncertainties," he said.
If gas hydrates emerge as an energy source, the country might not have to shell out big bucks to import energy, especially oil, which Korea does not produce.
In addition, the ministry aims to beef up its initiative to find traditional resources like gas fields such as the Donghae-1 field in the East Sea, which was discovered in 1998 and began to produce gas in 2004.