At a press conference during the recently concluded India Energy Week in Delhi, a journalist put this question to Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Puri: Has India given up its gas hydrates programme?

This refers to the National Gas Hydrate Programme, which formally began in 1997 (conceptualised even earlier). The India Energy Week, run by the Oil Ministry and touted as the world’s second biggest energy event, had not a word about gas hydrates — a huge source of natural gas available within India’s reach. 

Minister Puri shrugged, and handed the mike to Petroleum Secretary Pankaj Jain. He replied that under the new petroleum licensing policy, it was left to the winning concessionaire to extract any hydrocarbons from the designated area, including gas hydrates — meaning, the government was hands-off. 

Gas hydrate is just natural gas — methane — that has mixed with water and become ice. It falls under the head ‘unconventional hydrocarbons’, along with coal bed methane. 

Gas hydrates are mostly found on the seabed. In India, huge quantities of gas hydrates have been found around the Andaman Islands and in Krishna-Godavari (KG) offshore. According to the International Energy Agency’s India Energy Outlook, 2021, India’s estimated gas hydrate potential is 1,894 trillion cubic metres. To put this in perspective, India’s coal bed methane potential is 1.3 tcm. 

So, the potential is staggeringly high — if only we could convert the hydrates back into natural gas. There are indeed technical challenges — sea-floor subsidence; gas leak and its impact on marine biota; and release of water, which would need to be treated first before being let back into the sea. But going by reports — such as the insightful article written for the Observer Research Foundation by Dr N Vedachalam, Senior Scientist and Programme Director at the National Institute of Ocean Technology, Chennai — the challenges are not insurmountable. For example, the water can be transferred to the ‘floating production, storage and offloading’ systems that are regularly used in offshore oil production. Sea-floor subsidence can be handled through measured extraction of gas from the hydrates, since, after a period of de-pressurisation, the hydrate zone becomes like a conventional gas well. 

‘National importance’

The government is aware of the importance of gas hydrates. A 2016 note from the Oil Industry Development Board stated that the National Gas Hydrates Programme is of “national importance”. A 2020 press release from the Ministry of Science and Technology is more detailed. Noting that a cubic metre of gas hydrate contains 160-180 cubic metre of methane, it goes on to say, “Even the lowest estimate of methane present in the methane hydrates in KG Basin is twice that of all fossil fuel reserves available worldwide.” 

The question is why, even after three decades, India has not been able to tap its huge gas hydrate reserves. 

Tardy progress

Progress has been rather slow under the programme. There have been two drilling expeditions (by the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons) — in 2006 and 2015 — and the 39 and 42 boreholes, respectively, established the presence of gas hydrates in the KG and Mahanadi basins, and near the Andamans. The first expedition found a 120-m-thick hydrate zone just 40 m below the sea floor in the KG basin. The second confirmed the findings and established a 150 sq km area in KG as a prospective zone. A detailed technical analysis of the second expedition is available. 

After that, things fell silent. 

The common refrain that other countries, too, have not extracted gas from hydrates is specious, especially given India’s ambition of becoming a vishwaguru, or world leader. But, notably, other countries like the US, Canada and Japan, which have gas hydrate reserves, do not have the economic compulsions that India has. The US, which has chosen shale as its primary source of unconventional hydrocarbons, feels little pressure to worry about hydrates. Japan has done some work in the Nankai Trough, but, again, has its own priorities. 

Perhaps the reasons for India’s failure to tap gas hydrates are less technical, and more to do with economics. Gas from hydrates will be more expensive; unless there is a premium for it in the market, there is little incentive for an oil company to explore this option. This calls for long-term vision and government intervention. “The economics of methane gas production from marine gas hydrates should not be compared with the natural gas import prices,” says Dr Vedachalam, stressing that the use of a domestic resource will bring down costs in the long run.

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Published on March 2, 2025