In a world awash in oil and gas, you’d think it couldn’t get any worse. Well, it can: China just announced that it had extracted a record amount of what has been poetically called fire ice. It is, however, a form of natural gas trapped in frozen water. At 861,400 cubic meters, this record might not be a whole lot of gas, but it may well be the start of something new, and gas producers may not like this ‘something’. Gas hydrates don’t garner a lot of media attention as a rule, simply because they have yet to become an addition to the world’s energy mix. But when they do—if they do—they may change the international oil and gas market even more than the coronavirus outbreak has changed it now by decimating demand for hydrocarbons. First, what are gas hydrates? Gas hydrates are molecules of natural gas, most commonly […]