warms to

Japan warms to 'fire ice' potential

(Financial Times) -- 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.

Japan Oil, Gas & Metals National Corp said on Tuesday it had successfully extracted gas from deposits of methane hydrate, a hyper-abundant mix of frozen water and methane sometimes called "fire ice". Other countries, including the US and Canada, are also conducting research on methane hydrate, which experts say is at least twice as plentiful as all known reserves of natural gas.

Prospects for commercial extraction remain far from certain. But Ryo Minami, director of the oil and gas division at Japan's Agency for Natural Resources, compared methane hydrate to shale gas, the once-marginal resource which is transforming the US energy market: "Ten years ago, everybody knew there was shale gas in the ground, but to extract it was too costly. Yet now it's commercialised."

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/12/business/japan-fire-ice-gas/index.html?hpt=ias_c2

warm toはなんとなくイメージしやすいPVです。「に興奮する」（"become excited about"）という意味ですが、ここでは「沸き立つ」「沸き返る」などいろいろ考えられそうですね。なお、同類のwarm up toは以前、Asahi Weekly（6/5, 2011）で取り上げています。（UG）