Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Toshimitsu Motegi, Thursday asked visiting US energy secretary Ernest Moniz to move forward the two countries' bilateral agreement on methane hydrate cooperation, a METI source said.
The request was made during a ministerial-level meeting in Tokyo, where the ministers met for the first time since they last met in Washington in July, the source said.
Tokyo's request was made to move forward a state of intent, which METI and the US Department of Energy signed in 2008, to work together to develop methane hydrate production, the source said.
The source, however, declined to disclose the response from Moniz on its request during the bilateral meeting.
During a lecture in Tokyo earlier Thursday, Moniz, however, pointed to METI's long-running research into extracting gas from undersea methane hydrate deposits. (see story 0907 GMT)
"Methane hydrates represent research challenges but a very important resource potential," said Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before President Obama appointed him. "In my former life at MIT, when we wrote on natural gas, we noted that methane hydrates could be the next big revolution following shale gas, although it will take some time, certainly, to make this a commercially viable activity."
Under the 2008 agreement, the two countries said the proposed cooperation would enhance understanding of gas hydrates and speed up research into their exploration and development.
In March, Japan produced a total of 120,000 cubic meters, or 20,000 cu m/day, of gas from methane hydrate at a six-day offshore output test in central Japan, according to preliminary figures released by state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation at the time.
Production from the test compares with 13,000 cu m or 2,400 cu m/day of gas produced during a 5.5-day onshore output test carried out by Japan in Canada in 2008.
Methane hydrates are solid, ice-like deposits of water and natural gas, located deep underwater where cold temperatures and extreme pressure causes the gas to condense and solidify.
Although there are a number of technical barriers to methane hydrate production, such as achieving sufficient flow rates to reduce production costs, known resources could be large enough to meet Japan's demand for about 14 years, based on its confirmation of 40 Tcf of methane hydrate resources in place in the southern Sea of Kumano in 2007.
During the meeting Thursday, Motegi also expressed Japan's hope that the DOE would give early approvals for two applications to export LNG to countries without free trade agreements -- such as Japan -- from projects in which Japanese companies are involved, METI sources said.
The two US LNG projects are Train 3 of the Freeport project in Texas, where Toshiba has a liquefaction tolling agreement for a base quantity of 2.2 million mt/year, and the Cameron LNG project in Louisiana, where Mitsubishi and Mitsui have a tolling agreement to take 4 million mt/year each.
The DOE, which Moniz heads, has approved four applications to export a total of 6.37 Bcf/d of LNG to countries without FTAs. Two of the approvals went to projects in which Japanese companies have tolling agreements: Freeport LNG in Texas and Cove Point LNG in Maryland.
As the world's largest LNG importer, Japan has found itself increasingly exposed to high prices mainly because its LNG purchases are predominantly indexed to crude oil prices.
Japan has been actively asking its major suppliers of LNG for stable but competitive or affordable supplies of LNG as it has faced steady needs of LNG in the wake of the devastating March 2011 earthquake and subsequent nuclear outages.
