Fire ice Do you remember the peak oil hysteria from the early 2000s? Oil didn’t just not end, the world started pumping even more thanks to the shale revolution. Now the reign of fossil fuels is being undermined by renewable energy and batteries, spurred on by the growing environmental awareness of humankind. But it’s precisely this growing awareness – along with a few other things like the drive to energy independence – that could usher in a new era of fossil fuels: the era of methane hydrates. Methane hydrates are, simply put, molecules of natural gas trapped in the crystal structure of frozen water molecules far below the seabed. Back in 2013, the Scientific American wrote that the world’s reserves of this compound, poetically called fire ice , could be as much as 15 times greater than total shale gas reserves. This is a truly staggering amount, but realistically, […]