Environmental Hazards from Offshore Methane Hydrate Operations: Civil Liability and Regulations for Efficient Governance

Environmental Hazards from Offshore Methane Hydrate Operations presents the first treatment of the legal issues facing the future of offshore methane hydrates, perhaps one of the largest known potential sources of fresh water and energy in the world today, taking into account both proprietary interests and environmental hazards. Although methane hydrates are not recent discoveries, it is only now that their extraction and production are becoming commercially feasible as a major new energy source. They are present offshore in almost every coastal state, and their economic potential for endowing those states with abundant natural gas is vast. This book develops a theoretical foundation for a model regulatory framework for those challenges and then provides a comparative legal analysis of existing laws and conventions to determine their fitness for offshore methane hydrates related activities.

What’s in this book:

Starting from law and economics theory as applied to environmental accidents, this book’s analytical framework addresses how best to provide for the opportunities and challenges presented by offshore methane hydrates. Issues and topics include the following:

• introduction to the science and technology of offshore methane hydrates;
• methane as a green energy source;
• research programs and agendas that are under way in Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, China, and India;
• carbon capture and sequestration;
• risks – methane emissions, large-scale combustion events, subsea landslides, tsunamis, earthquakes, deep-ocean eruptions;
• strategies of risk governance – during exploration, development, production, and abandonment of the extraction process;
• acts that enable seeping and venting of methane;
• regulatory compliance as a defense from liability;
• grounds for deference to rules of civil liability;
• potential impact on anthropogenic climate change; and
• private regulation and market-based incentives.

How this will help you:

As a road map to amending and revising existing laws and conventions, this book will be of inestimable practical value to policymakers in supporting the optimal risk governance of the development of methane hydrates. For potential entrepreneurs and operators, this book greatly reduces the legal uncertainty underlying their decision-making and investment decisions. Furthermore, this book enables a broad cross-section of legal practitioners and scholars to engage in this fascinating late arrival to the natural resources law and policy arena.

Features:

• The first-ever monograph on the legal issues surrounding the opportunities and hazards of offshore methane hydrates.
• Introduction to the science and nature of offshore methane hydrates in such a simple manner that even a layman could understand easily.
• A survey of the potential commercial benefits to be obtained from the extraction of offshore methane hydrates.
• An inventory is presented of the cataclysmic and non-cataclysmic risks from extracting and producing offshore methane hydrates.
• A theoretical foundation is provided for the optimal regulation and governance of these resources.
• A model regulatory framework is provided, inclusive of both civil liability rules and private regulatory mechanisms
• A comparative law review of existing laws and conventions to examine their readiness for the onset of commercial methane hydrate extraction activities.
• Two Executive Summaries are provided: one for policymakers on the model regulatory framework and one for legislators on how to update current laws and regulations.

Benefits:

• Learn about the giant unknown energy resource that dwarfs crude oil and natural gas – offshore methane hydrates.
• Discover the potential role of offshore methane hydrates in increasing global energy security and energy supplies.
• Discover the novel cataclysmic risks, such as tsunami, posed by the development of offshore methane hydrates extraction.
• Explore both conventional and climate change inducing risks presented from methane hydrate extraction activities.
• Gain an understanding of how civil liability rules provide incentives to risk-takers to set efficient precautionary and activity levels.
• Observe where public regulations can be effectively brought to bear to address environmental hazards and where they are not effective.
• Discover why current laws and regulations are not ready for the risks provided by offshore methane hydrate extraction activities.
• Learn how policymakers and legislators can readily amend existing laws and conventions to ensure readiness for offshore methane hydrates.