Japan Extracts Natural Gas From Frozen Methane Hydrate

ixarux writes "For the first time ever, a Japanese company has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off its central coast. The Nankai Trough gas field, located a little more than 30 miles offshore, could provide an alternative energy source for the island nation, reducing its dependence on foreign imports. 'A Japanese study estimated that at least 1.1tn cubic meters of methane hydrate exist in offshore deposits. This is the equivalent of more than a decade of Japan's gas consumption. Japan has few natural resources and the cost of importing fuel has increased after a backlash against nuclear power following the Fukushima nuclear disaster two years ago.'"

The Duh Factor

[Anonymous Coward]

I live within eight miles of a nuclear reactor and for the life of me I can not understand putting a nuke on a beach just as we have done here. Areas that have earth quakes, high energy storms and beaches need to not have nuclear reactors as they are now designed. In addition large population areas are also not a great idea as wars do occur and terror attacks can and have taken place. I am aware that the concrete domes are built to take quite a hit but to me that is about like saying that bank vaults are secure against burglars. Obviously even multimillion dollar vaults get penetrated from time to time.
                        I do wonder why safety is such a lost notion on our leaders.

Article sucked

[gurps_npc]

The article says Japan "extracted" the methane. But it says nothing about how they extracted it. By extraction they could simply mean melting the ice. Which is worthless. What we need is a way to transport it from the frozen bottom of the sea to the room temperature power plants

The problem is transporting it. Transporting liquids (oil) is easy, you pump it through pipes to tanks. Transporting gas is slightly harder as you pump it in air-tight pipes to air-tight tanks.

Transporting room temperature solids is a moderately hard, you shovel it and truck it.

But frozen methane is the worst. It is solid when left alone, but turns to gas at room temperature. Worse, it is almost always at the bottom of the ocean.

If they solved this problem, great. But we don;t know they did that, because they were not very clear at all.

In my experience there is a simple explanation for that lack of information - very bad translation from a foreign language. Someone probably solved a rather minor technical issue about removing the frozen water, leaving the gas, but it probably did NOT solve the major 'do it underwater, at huge depths, at freezing cold temperatures, by robot' problem.

Instead of explaining that it was a minor technical victory, they left out all the details and claimed translation issues.

Re:Seems like a good step

[pixelpusher220]

Eh, depending on some variables maybe it isn't that bad.

1. Assuming that they'd burn coal if they didn't use the methane.
2. Assuming the energy released from burning the methane is similar to the energy released from burning coal (I don't know)

then burning something that is inherently unstable like the Methane Hydrates in the oceans is far better than burning the coal. The coal is a nice stable solid at every human habitable temperature. They Hydrates aren't. If the ocean warms too much, the hydrates will just bubble out and poof, LOTS more methane in the atmosphere that didn't provide us anything useful - and we have the CO2 released from burning the coal.

So the devil is in the details, and the best solution is burning neither methane nor coal, but if you have to pick, choose the one that isn't likely to spontaneously turn into another form thus making your situation much much worse.

Could be a death blow for vast areas of the ocean

[Grayhand]

Everyone ignores the obvious downside of hydrates. The are stored in the sands at the bottom of the ocean so it means effectively strip mining huge tracks of the ocean to recover them. The ecosystem of the ocean is dependent on the ocean floor and reefs both of which would be devastated by this kind of exploitation. There's also the issue of the dirt thrown into the water column choking fish. The oceans are badly stressed as it is so dredging most of the remaining ocean could be what collapses what's left of the fisheries.

Re: No... you can't read

[Anonymous Coward]

It specifically says they used the "Engineers used a depressurisation method that turns methane hydrate into methane gas."... google it... and find: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_hydrate

Good News Bad News

[DumbSwede]

We seem to be having an unprecedented set of advances in extracting hydrocarbon based fuel sources other than conventional oil (and all that implies for the environment).

I support clean energy and would really like to see research expanded into fusion energy. However not a week goes by I don’t see someone preaching doom and gloom about Peak Oil. Even if these methane hydrate deposits don’t pan out (which actually they probably will) Oil Shale deposits have proven reserves of over 1 Trillion Barrels equivalent using current technology (and an insane potential with future advances) and the U.S. has the largest reserves worldwide. This is equivalent to approximately to all the known reserves for conventional oil and we have hardly begun to exploit it. Check out this link on Wikipedia for the numbers : Oil Shale Reserves [slashdot.org].

Energy may become (slightly) more expensive in the future, there may temporary shocks from transition periods as we go to new hydrocarbon sources, but in the long run usable energy is there for the extraction in an economically viable fashion. If anything all this PEEK-OIL talk over inflates the value of energy. One has to wonder about agendas here. The only thing PEEK-OIL is doing is selling a lot of books for scare-mongers.

Perhaps we should go slow on utilizing these sources because of the environment, but even so I don’t see why prices are so high when every indicator seems to suggest there are massive new sources at hand. On the other hand if prices where low would we continue our slow march toward efficient use of what we have (LED replacement bulbs for instance and better insulated houses).

Re:Seems like a good step

[Anonymous Coward]

Globally, there is more than 250 times that quantity (~1,000,000 tcf). It's a virtually untapped resource that will disappear if not used soon. It's enough to run the whole planet for about 30 years if everyone had the consumption level of Japan.

Re:Good News Bad News

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Wake up earth hugger. Hydrocarbons are the most readily and cheapest available source of energy an compared to all other alternatives.

It would be nice to go all alternative, but for a country like Japan its just not an option. Even if all they did was build solar and wind farms for the next 20 years they still wouldn't have enough.

I tire of the knee jerk reaction from green alarmists that any non-ideal form of energy must instantly be boycotted and just spout off diatribes like "lets all use solar power and just, like, hug the world". There are never any real solutions presented, just senseless idealism. If only we could power the world off green idealism then we would have a million times the energy we need.

Also there is no conspiracy or agenda here, sheesh. You can be rest assured that once it is no longer cost effective or viable to get energy from fossil fuels, people will turn to alternatives. But price per watt output of fossil fuels is still significantly cheaper then all alternatives. You have to spend billions on alternative energy to get a fraction of the power from hydrocarbons.

Bottom line is the world's energy crisis isn't going to be solved just by better insulating homes and using LED bulbs and plugging into a wind farm. Why not wiki up the national requirements for energy of a country like Japan and then wonder why they choose to research into hydrocarbon based energy or use nuclear power in the first place.

BTW, plants and trees fucking love our use of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions.