We, people, are thinking that oil and gas, in other language, the fossil fuels are going through the declining phase and how our comming generation will withstand this dearth.
That is when a volcanic discovery arrived in the picture. A recent discovery says that "even ice is a fuel", a fossil fuel. That means ice also burns? Its kind of unusual to hear so. But its not a joke, its true, ice burns.
The ice is named as the Gas Hydrate or the Methane Hydrate. Gas hydrates are ice-like crystal containing of low-molecular hydrocarbon(mainly methane) like methane, ethane and very negligible amount of propane reside in the cages of hydrogen bonded water molecules and are formed at elevated pressure and low temperature when gas concentration exceeds the solubility limit. They occur world wide of the oceanic sediments of outer continental margins, both active and passive, in deep water sediments of inland lakes and sea and polar sediments of continents and continental shelves.
The history of humanity is charecterized by the competition for living space on our small planet. The past decade has been one of the high population and energy consumption growth. Over the past century the population of the earth has increased four-fold, exceeding 6.5 billion while energy consumption grew by an order of magnitude of 0.9*10^9 tons of oil equivelent (TOE) to 1.03*10^9 TOE (BP,2008). The rate of modern civilization growth in the future will depend on several factors, but the quality and quantity of the energy used will be amongst the most important factors.

We all have heard about the shale gas boom that has boosted the US and World Economy in recent past providing lakhs of jobs to the localities and other people but we cannot over look the fact that the shale reserves are very limited, and they are now in a declining stage. In contrast to that the reserves of gas hydrates are so much that our generations next to come may not wipe out completely even. If gas hydrate is produced efficiantly, economically and safely then the boom to be take place due to it will strengthen the energy security of the world.
Gas Hydrates were first discovered by Priestly in 1778, under laboratory condition by bubbling SO2 with zero degree water atmospheric pressure. After 33years later Davy discovered similar chlorine clathrate and named it as gas hydrate. Some consider Davy to be the discoverer of gas hydrates but Priestly was the first to discover gas hydrates in laboratory.
Methane hydrates or Gas hydrates - frozen deposits of main ingredients of natural gas found in ocean sediments and near permafrost are thought to be abundant. World wide such deposits contains 35% more natural gas then any other reserves. The gas hydrate deposits would supply gas to the world for next couple of centuries to come or even more, as the researches say. Methane Hydrate fuel is going to be another gas boom in the near future definetly.