What are gas hydrates?

The English chemistry pioneer Sir Humphry Davy first combined gas and water to produce a solid substance in his lab in 1810. For more than a century after that landmark moment, a small number of scientists catalogued various solid “hydrates” formed by combining water with an assortment of gases and liquids. Sloan and Koh (2007) review this early research, which was aimed at discerning the chemical structures of gas hydrates (Fig. 1.1), as well as the pressures and temperatures at which they are stable. Because no practical applications were found for these synthetic gas hydrates, they remained an academic curiosity.