Why? Because of the enormous versatility of fuel sources and would stretch methane hydrate resources even further. Electricity for the batteries can come from a multitude of non-fossil sources: solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal. The methanol for the fuel cells could come from a multitude of sources as well: biomass crops, recycled garbage and also natural gas chemically converted to methanol.

The fuel cells would give the hybrid unlimited range just like an internal combustion engine, but with far greater efficiency and miles per gallon. But 90% of all miles driven is short range trips that could be supplied by the batteries. Only the remaining 10% of miles driven would be long range trips powered by the methanol fuel cells. This would make even more efficient use of the methanol where very little is consumed.

And the methanol could all be made from methane gas. Having such a methanol fuel cell / battery combination would be the ideal ultimate combination for hybrids, and would extend an already vast methane hydrate supply even further. You could run the transportation sector almost forever this way. This would be a far more efficient use of hydrates for transportation. No sense in wastefully burning-up all the hydrates just because the supply seems endless.

Dr. Yuri Makogon (now of Texas A&M) recently was awarded a career medal at the Int’l Conf on Gas Hydrates (2008 – Vancouver) for his initial work on gas hydrates in nature. It started in the late 1960s. Trofimuk made the first global assessments (1973 and thereafter). Also Cherskiy and Tsarev (1977), Nesterov and Salmanov (1981). I don’t want to do your research for you. If you want a detailed description of early gas hydrates research, you could look here… I pull this from Milkov’s important 2003 paper. Google it if you want to learn more…

“Makogon (1966) was apparently the first to publish a methodology of estimating hydrate-bound gas in the subsurface, although the first gas hydrate samples were recovered much later (Yefremova and Zizchenko, 1974). Around 20 global estimates of submarine gas hydrate have been published over the last 30 years, the earliest by Trofimuk et al. (1973) and the latest by Milkov et al. (2003). Kvenvolden (1999) analyzed a subset of the global estimates (Table 1) and suggested that 21×1015 m3 of methane (or 10,000 Gt of methane carbon, Kvenvolden and Lorenson, 2001) should be considered as a “consensus value” because some independent estimates (e.g., by Kvenvolden, 1988 and MacDonald, 1990) converge around that value. The value 10,000 Gt of methane carbon is currently used to justify gas hydrate research (e.g., Wood et al., 2002 and Hesse, 2003) and is incorporated into the models of the global organic carbon cycle (Kvenvolden, 2002)…

To learn more about the current thinking among the science community on the dominantly biogenic source of the gas in gas hdyrates, you could begin by reading on pg 551 of the 3rd Edition of “Clathrate Hydrates of Natural Gases” by E.D. Sloan of the Colorado School of Mines.