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| Economy |
| Media Discovers Methane Hydrate as a Fuel |
| 2012-11-12 |
| A half mile below the ground at Prudhoe Bay, above the vast oil field that helped trigger construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline, a drill rig has tapped what might one day be the next big energy source. The U.S. Department of Energy and industry partners over two winters drilled into a reservoir of methane hydrate, which looks like ice but burns like a candle if a match warms its molecules. There is little need now for methane, the main ingredient of natural gas. With the boom in production from hydraulic fracturing, the United States is awash in natural gas for the near future and is considering exporting it, but the DOE wants to be ready with methane if there's a need. There's tons of the stuff on the ocean floor, why make it complicated to recover? Oh, ask the DOE! The author mis-wrote the sentence: "the DOE wants to be ready to STOP with methane." There, that fixed it. "If you wait until you need it, and then you have 20 years of research to do, that's not a good plan," said Ray Boswell, technology manager for methane hydrates within the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory. 20 years of research and 20 more years of court battles with the environmentalists... Most deposits are below the sea floor off the continental shelf or under permafrost. Shallow pockets of methane hydrate release the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and that process is exacerbated by climate warming. Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity said research money should be poured into renewable resources, not more fossil fuel sources. Methane is 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, though not as long-lived. Maybe the WaPo likes methane hydrate, 'cuz it's "new". |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #3 Methane hydrate was a subplot for the remake of Dallas. It was a stupid subplot but so were many of the other subplots. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2012-11-12 20:17 |
| #2 We should save some of the clathrates for when the next Ice Age starts. Winter is coming. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2012-11-12 17:07 |
| #1 Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. In my uninformed opinion, if these clathrates 'melt' and release that methane we might actually match the temperature rise that has been postulated for 'global warming'. I would suspect that such releases have happened before - perhaps due to solar patterns, perhaps due to worldwide bolide-ignited fires, perhaps due to plate tectonics. The gerbil wormists MIGHT actually be right, if we are so close to a 'tipping point' that anthropogenic CO2 emmissions are enough to initiate methane hydrate melting, and starting that feedback loop. So, to defend our climate, we must quickly extract all the methane hydrate and convert it to the less damaging gas, CO2. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2012-11-12 16:33 |