FT: Japan lifts hopes for new energy source

Japan has moved closer to unlocking a potential new energy source, after a research group extracted methane gas from frozen undersea deposits for the first time.

Japanese officials hope the achievement, in a test conducted off Japan’s central Pacific coast, will win their resource-poor nation a measure of energy independence. It was announced a day after the second anniversary of the Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis that crippled the country’s atomic power industry and exposed its lack of domestic energy sources.  MORE

Related reading: Methane Hydrates and the Potential Natural Gas Boom