Monetizing Gas: Focusing on Developments in Gas Hydrate as a Mode of Transportation

Natural gas and energy resource management is a major challenge in the rapidly changing global and business environment. Increase in gas recoveries and gas production have led a major review in the ways of transporting natural gas energy. Monetizing gas has now become a high priority issue for many countries. Natural gas is a much cleaner fuel than oil and coal especially for electricity generation.Interest in gas hydrate being used as a means of transporting natural gas has increased over the last decade. New technology development has been focusing on using gas hydrates as a way of converting gas to solids to transport to markets around the world. Gas hydrate may be a viable means of storing and transporting gas but more focus should be given to some critical considerations for this gas hydrate development.This paper would discuss some of these issues as we move towards monetizing gas in the form of hydrate. These include energy balance in hydrate formation and re-gasification, storage of the hydrate, form of transporting the hydrate and distances to be transported. Other important factors are re-gasification technologies, economics compared to other gas transportation modes, environmental, climate and other issues.