Abstract
Hydrates in nature have been known for a long time. In the last couple of decades the possibility of commercial utilization of natural hydrates has arisen as an alternative energy source. This paper asks 21 questions that, in the author's opinion, need to be addressed and answered correctly before one can be confident one understands the scope of the problem one is facing in attempting to address the role of natural hydrates, both commercially and geologically.
References
1.
Originally I had a very long list of references that I had compiled and was going to include. But then there are so many papers on hydrates and associated aspects that I realized I would do an injustice to a goodly fraction of such authors because I would inevitably fail to quote some papers considered by the relevant authors as being of cardinal interest. Also there is no way I could even read the 600,000 + articles on the Web alone. At a reading rate of 1 article per minute the Web entries would have taken 10,000 hours to go through – almost a full year of work assuming I did nothing else! So in the end I decided to do an injustice to all authors of all papers, books and reports associated with hydrates – including not referencing my own works on hydrates. If you want to start trying to understand hydrates and all the ramifications just type “hydrates” when doing a Google search; the flood of information is overwhelming. I apologize to those who feel offended by omission of reference to their work but, truly, there is no unbiased way to cull so many references.