Complexities of Natural Gas Hydrates as an Energy Resource and its relation with Climate Change

The ever-growing energy demands, declining oil prices, dwindling new findings of oil/gas reservoirs, complexity, and uncertainty associated with unconventional oil/gas supplies; and the seriousness towards mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions essentially implies the risky and uncertain nature of future energy at the global scale. Such a risky and complex pathway has made the exploration of unconventional hydrocarbons resources such as natural gas hydrates one of the potential alternatives that can significantly contribute to the growing energy demand. There is a huge gap between the experimental investigations and its associated up-scaling to a larger field-scale as these gas hydrates are generally located in highly remote places such as polar- and marine-environments. Thus, more studies are still required towards the field-scale exploration and production of gas-hydrates with their associated environmental, economic, and social consequences. In this context, an attempt has been made in order to list out the practical difficulties that are experienced during the exploration and production of natural gas hydrates as a possible and new energy resource given the constraints associated with the conventional fossil fuels. These complexities associated with the real field-scale production of gas hydrates are expected to provide improved insights for experimental scientists working on gas hydrates. In addition, the way the natural gas hydrates gets associated with climate change has been discussed in detail, and critical conclusions have been drawn.