Necessity is the mother of exploitation

This isn't a new idea, I've certainly heard of it, but like a lot of other, probably more desirable ideas, high (conventional) hydrocarbon fuel prices are making it possible. Be careful what you wish for, Greens...

Japan is growing ever-more desperate to secure its energy, as once-reliable suppliers - such as Indonesia and Australia - have begun either to cut back exports of natural gas and coal or charge crippling prices.

Its direct interests in vital global energy projects, such as oil drilling in Sakhalin and Iran, have also been whittled away by politics and diplomatic rivalries.

The potential of methane hydrates as a source of natural gas has been known scientifically for some time, though how much was lurking off the Japanese coast has been confirmed only in the past couple of years. Methane hydrates are believed to collect along geological fault lines, and Japan sits atop a nexus of three of the world's largest.

In 2007 the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry declared that there were more than 1.1 trillion cubic metres (39 trillion cubic feet) of methane hydrates off the eastern coast - equivalent to 14 years of natural gas use by Japan at current rates. Academic studies suggest total Japanese deposits of 7.4 trillion cubic metres.

There's much more to this, but the upshot is that a world of scarcity is not a Kyoto Accord-friendly place. In the parts of the world where the enviro-left is not a significant presence (e.g. most of it) they don't give a rat's ass for anything the Gore-ians have to say, their inconvenient truth is that they are too heavily populated and invested in an industrialized standard of living to allow themselves to be de-industrialized by the Greens.

My personal hope is that the ability to exploit this sort of thing will stop the rampant speculating and gouging in the oil and NG prices, but that's asking a lot. High oil prices giveth (push for innovation, reduced consumption) and they taketh away (high prices for food and, hell, everything else). Burning hydrocarbons of some sort is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and I'm of the opinion that the real crisis is yet to come.

[Later the same day...] This seems to back that last paragraph up:

The Associated Press

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- A deep-water exploration area off Brazil's coast could contain as much as 33 billion barrels of oil, the head of Brazil's National Petroleum Agency said Monday. That would make it the world's third-largest known oil reserve.

It goes on to talk about Saudi having 260B bbl of proven reserves and Canada 170B or so, so it seems evident that we're not going to run out of oil, even if it'll cost us a lot more. Everyone forgets that we went through an oil crisis 35 years ago, one which holds many parallels and lessons, were we inclined to draw such things from history...

There will be a lot more belt tightening for all concerned in the near future, with the price of oil staying high regardless of how much hydrated methane we pump out. The real pinch in food prices is around the corner; the one thing I hope from that is that it stops poaching of our agricultural land for development as farms become more profitable, but there are a lot of variables in that equation so no predictions there.

I'm on the fence about this methane thing being good or not (insufficient data at present), but I will say that good, bad or ugly, now that we know that it can be done, it will be.