The Gulf is geologically strange. Centuries of Mississippi sediments collecting offshore have depressed the bottom, warping the strata and creating pinchouts and traps that collect migrating hydrocarbons. The stresses force salt to flow like fluid into domes, punching up through the layers, creating even more nooks and crannies along the edges where oil and brines collect. Who knows what tectonic process in the abyssal plain have contributed to this weird subterranean, submarine geometry. That's why there's so much hydrocarbons there. You don't need Techie's macrobiotic oil in the Gulf, the place is weird enough as is.

My friend Capt Tait was sailing his yacht back from a race to Cancun and when he crossed over the Yucatan continental shelf into deep water the ship suddenly entered a several miles wide area of flat, glassy water, in spite of the brisk breeze and vigorous seas and swells all around it. The water was filled with tiny bubbles, "like champagne". Tait's a geographer and a chemist, and he theorized an undersea avalanche in the continental slope had exposed a porous strata full of methane, which precipitated out of solution as it billowed towards warmer and lower pressure surface waters. (I think I posted his email correspondence on this topic with his professors at USF here on the Zone a long time ago.) They couldn't rule out his theory, and joked it was fortunate none of his crew were smokers!

As for the methane detonating due to an explosive charge, I don't think that's too likely, there's very little oxygen down there. But what are those "clathrate crystals", anyway? I've never heard of that before, but the oil dudes seem fairly familiar with them.