Japan Extracts Natural Gas From Frozen Methane Hydrate 154
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.'"
Seems like a good step (Score:3)
But I don't understand why Japan doesn't perfect Deep water cooling [wikipedia.org] technology, using heat exchanges and thermocouples to generate energy. Or is the Inland Sea not deep enough?
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Re:Seems like a good step (Score:5, Informative)
That seems better. "More than a decade" sounds too short term of an investment.
According to the NY Times, the overall gas available may be more like 100 years' worth:
Jogmec estimates that the surrounding area in the Nankai submarine trough holds at least 1.1 trillion cubic meters, or 39 trillion cubic feet, of methane hydrate, enough to meet 11 years’ worth of gas imports to Japan.
A separate, rough estimate by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has put the total amount of methane hydrate in the waters surrounding Japan at more than 7 trillion cubic meters, or what researchers have long said is closer to 100 years’ worth of Japan’s natural gas needs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/business/global/japan-says-it-is-first-to-tap-methane-hydrate-deposit.html?hp [nytimes.com]
Re:11 years or 100 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Huge difference between looking at estimated recoverable vs. estimated total quantity. Just because we know an energy source exists doesn't mean it will ever be worthwhile to spend the energy required to recover it. eg, Helium-3.
Shall beds are geographically huge, but note how they have so far only been drilled in the thickest portions and only the shallowest formations have been actively pursued (marcellus vs. utica). It takes a lot of energy to get a gas well to produce, sometimes more than it will ever
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The Inland Sea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seto_Inland_Sea) is not deep enough.
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Thank you, right information, just from wikipedia articles alone.
Yours:
"The average depth is 37.3 m (122 ft); the greatest depth is 105 m (344 ft)."
Mine:
"To obtain water in the 3 to 6 C (37 to 43 F) range, a depth of 66 m (217 ft) is required."
Looks like it is possible, but only certain cities could do it.
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Because deep water cooling is an air conditioning system - not a power generation system. Anyhow, the problem with thermocouples (other than not being particularly efficient) is generally getting the hot leg hot enough, not cooling the cold leg.
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Thermocouples isn't the way to do it. Stirling engines are.
Efficiency is not a serious concern when your energy source is cost free.
The costs of this problem are all in your equipment to handle the fluids, there is no fuel as such so efficiency doesn't directly matter. What is important is how much your plant costs you to generate X watts. Of course if spending 1% more on the plant to improve efficiency gets you 10% more energy then that's a fine thing to do, but i see no problem with running these plants a
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And costs are more than "equipment to handle fluids"... There's the capital costs of the land, structure, equipment, and infrastructure.
Which is part of the equipment costs. Whether I use one cubic meter of water or a million doesn't matter because it is the equipment along with the implied land(if it exists, these could be floating platforms) and costs associated with that equipment that we are concerned about not the actual source of said energy that the equipment is using.
I am not in the slightest "blithely unaware" of these costs because they are irrelevant to the argument about efficiency vs equipment costs except that of course they a
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Not in ordinary English usage, no. Nor are the ongoing costs I mentioned and which you snipped.
When you say things like "costs are irrelevant", then perhaps "blithely" is too weak a word to d
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So let me get this straight.
Rather than saying "I bought the second hand Fiat because it was cheaper than the Ford" you say "I bought the second hand Fiat that is actually on its third owner not including the garage and distributor and Fiat themselves because even though it has significantly higher maintenance costs given the likely probability of breakdown and usage patterns for a typical but not necessary same demographic as myself; when you factor in the expected costs of depreciation on a new model and
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Perhaps it will also help if I mention i was also considering another use of this effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy [wikipedia.org]
Which might explain better some of the comments on efficiency and "free" source of energy
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Well, it is actually strange. Japan ought to be the perfect place for geothermal, tidal and wind power.
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Eh, what can I say, most of these points are valid for any project. Look how difficult is to build a bloody airport in Berlin.
Re:Seems like a good step (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Seems like a good step (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, methane is 25 times more potent as a grennhouse gas. So converting that to energy and CO2 gives you energy and a net reduction in the greenhouse effect.
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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.
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This only makes sense if the warming is unstoppable and there's no way to prevent the bubbling. Taking methane out from the continental shelf and burning it ADDS greenhouse gas. It only makes sense if doing nothing would allow all the methane to escape anyway.
Re:Seems like a good step (Score:5, Informative)
Taking methane out from the continental shelf and burning it ADDS greenhouse gas.
Not if it displaces burning coal. Per Kw, methane generates half as much CO2 as coal. Since AGW became an issue in the 1990's, the lion's share of CO2 reduction has been because of moving from coal to gas. Coal-to-gas isn't perfect, and it isn't a long term solution, but it works, it is cost effective, and it is actually happening in a big way . No other method of CO2 reduction even comes close. Don't make perfect the enemy of good. [wikipedia.org]
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The choices are currently limited. Coal which others have pointed out is stable where it is and when burnt releases much more carbon or methane. With methane we could get it out of the ground where it is currently stable and needs disgusting methods such as fragging to extract or from the continental shelf where it is not very stable and probably cleaner to extract.
Ideally is to have renewable energy supplying the bulk of energy but we're not there yet and there is likely to always be the odd time where the
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Even if it isn't, I'd say that removing an unstable time bomb of methane hydrates is better than using a stable carbon store.
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There was an article a few months back by an arctic scientist outlining a method using high-frequency radio waves to break-up released methane in the atmosphere. The end product was going to be water and carbon dioxide (of course). Both of those are greenhouse gasses, but not as bad as methane.
His take on it was that we're seeing catastrophic releases of methane NOW, so we need to take action to break this stuff up now, before too much floats too high into the atmosphere (out of range of the transmitters,
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Water vapor is a greenhouse gas but the water released by burning fossil fuels is not an issue. Because water can precipitate out of the atmosphere there is a balance between the liquid and gaseous states so any imbalance will quickly be corrected.
methane has shorter lifetime (Score:5, Informative)
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TIL my flatulence lasts for 20 years? That's awesome...
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True to a point, the global warming potential [wikipedia.org] of methane for 100 years is 25 and for 500 years is 7.6. So even after 500 years the methane is still 7.6 times as bad.
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And somehow you'd argue the methane is more stable?
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You can fix that by planting a rain forest or six.
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Planting enough rain forests (increasing the number of plants) will increase carbon absorption and end the hunger problem once and for all. The only reason you don't like it is because you aren't a scientist, you're a politician.
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I didn't say that I don't like it, just that it's not enough by itself to fully mitigate the problem. Hunger is more of a political problem than a supply problem.
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There's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to make the atmosphere "nothing but carbon dioxide". Still, if the level of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches even 1% we will be well and truly screwed.
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Converting Methane (a greenhouse gas 25 times as dense as CO2) to CO2 and energy is a bad idea how?
Especially given that global warming is now a runaway process.
Still, I'd say that deep water cooling would be a much better tech to develop for the long run.
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Converting methane at the bottom of the ocean to CO2 in our air is a bad idea. The only way it's a good idea is if you assume the methane would end up in the air anyway, which is only true if warming is unstoppable (in which case the hydrates are doomed to melt by themselves). So, if you argue burning hydrates is a good idea, you've implicitly accepted that warming is real and unstoppable. Which is something most "drill, baby, drill" folks tend to deny.
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But that methane doesn't *stay* at the bottom of the ocean:
http://www.neatorama.com/2010/08/08/bermuda-triangle-mystery-solved/ [neatorama.com]
Especially with global warming in process, this will only accelerate, and is in fact a navigational hazard.
And yes, I do accept that global warming is real, and unstoppable. I have some doubts that humans caused it entirely, but the facts that it is occurring and that we may well have played some role in making it worse are undeniable. But it's far too late for the blame game. Th
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It would be more accurate to say that humans aren't the only cause of climate change. As for the amount of it that is anthropogenic a couple of years ago a knowledgeable climate scientist estimated human influences cause 80-120% of climate change.
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I see what you did there. But of course, most "knowledgeable climate scientists" all seem to be politicians, not scientists. Their data is cherry picked to fit their prejudicial conclusions.
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My question to you is how could climate scientists expect to get away with falsifying their science? Any science that is based on the physical characteristics of nature as climate science is is subject to verification by other scientists. If what they are saying is politically motivated then sooner or later their deception will be found out and their scientific reputations trashed. I can't believe in the 25 years since the IPCC was formed that among all of the scientists around the world who are studying
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"My question to you is how could climate scientists expect to get away with falsifying their science?"
Simple. By coming to conclusions that are not supported by the real data.
"Any science that is based on the physical characteristics of nature as climate science is is subject to verification by other scientists. If what they are saying is politically motivated then sooner or later their deception will be found out and their scientific reputations trashed."
And some 12% of scientists do dissent on their data
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The level of conspiracy required to support your suppositions is not credible.
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It is when you consider the bigger political picture- and the fact that the media is *entirely* on the side of transferring more wealth from the many to the few, even if that means the wholesale slaughter of the many.
The current global warming proposals, which are all for trying to reduce the warming, are more about wealth transfer from the poor to the rich than anything else. Global Warming is just a convenient topic for the Mathusian Eugenicists to say "More white babies in Chicago and New York City, few
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If you think that scientists are in it for the money and presenting false conclusions about climate change then how is it that most of the things they thought would happen are happening on schedule if not ahead of schedule? There's not much they've got wrong so far.
That's a pretty big assumption that global warming will increase food production. It may but there will probably be many years of adjustments to our agricultural system to get there. More likely as long as the climate system remains in a state
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"If you think that scientists are in it for the money and presenting false conclusions about climate change then how is it that most of the things they thought would happen are happening on schedule if not ahead of schedule?"
Really? I don't see 20' of water covering downtown Manhattan yet. And I certainly don't see the ice age that was predicted for this time back in 1974.
"That's a pretty big assumption that global warming will increase food production."
Not much of one at all, if you have ever studied the
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Really? I don't see 20' of water covering downtown Manhattan yet. And I certainly don't see the ice age that was predicted for this time back in 1974.
That just shows how little you pay attention to what the climate scientists actually say. No scientist who is knowledgeable about cryology ever said Manhattan would be under water by now. And no, Al Gore didn't say that either. You need to pay attention to the time frame that they put on those statements. The last IPCC report in 2007 said sea level was expected to rise about 0.35 m (14") by the 2090-2099 time frame [www.ipcc.ch] but more current estimates are for SLR by 2100 is about 1 m (3+ feet). At the rate we'r
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". Do you think they want to be like the emperor with no clothes when their falsification is discovered? "
Once they have the grant money, why would they care?
"What makes you think I said scientists were infallible? I don't just start with the assumption that they failed. I think when they are wrong most of the time it's honest mistakes and not attempts to make the science something it isn't."
I'm far more cynical. I think they're usually wrong most of the time. They have some models that are useful, but th
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Article sucked (Score:5, Interesting)
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: No... you can't read (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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The problem is not extracting methane from ice or mining it at the bottom of the ocean. The problem is that these deposits are highly unstable, prone to spontaneous emissions and landslides. It is extremely unstable terrain.
You can't even put a ship above a major deposit and just start digging whatever you want. If you screw up and methane bubbles up, the bubbles will sink the ship - Bermuda Triangle and all that is prime example of how ships can just "disappear" because of methane releases from these "fire
Re:Article sucked (Score:5, Informative)
The article really sucked, so I went looking for another [telegraph.co.uk], even though it was only slightly better.
The major improvement is in depressurizing the hydrate so that the gas will boil off. They don't have a robot at those depths, the work is done at the end of a drill string
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By my reading of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate [wikipedia.org] one can extract the gas by heating the stuff to a specific point at which point the ice melts. You can also lower the pressure enough and the methane will exit on its own. I'm guessing they will do a little bit of both, some fracking followed by pumping out the fluid. Then nature will take its course and gas will rise to the top. The trick will be trying to control the pressure in the well because I understand the liberation of the gas can h
Methane Hydrate highly pressurized (Score:3)
Scientists have a pretty good idea now how to detect it on a conventional seismic section, whether they want to avoid it or drill for it. Its seems to be in continental shelves over much of the world.
Are They CRAZY???? (Score:3, Funny)
They are sure to awaken Godzilla.
This is madness! Madness, I tell you.
What they aren't telling you ... (Score:2)
Could be a death blow for vast areas of the ocean (Score:4, Interesting)
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. . .so it means effectively strip mining huge tracks of the ocean. . .
I don't think that they could recover their investment, if this is even technically possible. The extraction is done underground at the end of a drill string. The Nankai Trough is as much as 4000M deep, and the deposits that they're tapping are as much as 7000M below the sea floor. According the Wikipedia article on the Nankai Trough, there's a huge influx of sediment, which would make "strip mining" still more difficult.
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The ecosystem of the ocean is dependent on the ocean floor and reefs both of which would be devastated by this kind of exploitation.
I appreciate your mention of "reefs", as they are completely irrelevant to the depths in question, and make it easy to completely dismiss your cavil as what it is: the persistent whine of the naysayer, who is opposed to everything.
It's really useful for people with the courage to take risks with the future, and therefore make things better, to be able to spot the naysayers, and concern for "reefs" at thousands of feet below the ocean surface is a good way to do so in this case, like concern for "birds kill
"Japan Extracts Natural Gas From Natural Gas" (Score:2)
Hmmm...
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Good News Bad News (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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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 a
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Okay, here is the practical solution you asked for. It is being installed in Japan right now, with roll out on-going.
First you save energy. It is cheaper than adding new capacity and improves quality of life. Smart appliances, better insulation. Many new buildings have smart LED lighting that adjusts to keep light levels constant as the sun goes down and turns itself off when no-one is in the room. Similarly aircon units sense people and can cool just the areas where they are, even within a single room. Bli
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Supply and demand. It's the same reason why we will never run out of oil.
As oil and other hydrocarbon sources become more rare, the price goes up. As the price goes up, more exotic extraction methods go from too expensive to financially viable. You'll even see an occasional dip in prices as someone discovers a way to preform the extraction cheaper. In the long run, hydrocarbon prices will continue to increase though.
There will never be a day* when everyone stops using gasoline all at once. Instead it w
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As the price goes up, all of your more exotic extraction methods, which desperately depend on oil, also get more expensive. "Financially viable" requires profit, but more expensive energy just sucks up more resources. You just start shedding infrastructure, and going from cars to horses (or feet) will be a lot faster than the other way around. Things can fall a long time, but the stop is still sudden.
Re:Good News Bad News (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason prices are so high is because the "massive" new sources come with massive new costs to extract. Oil Shale (kerogen) is a great case in point; it is essentially rock with heavy, like waxy heavy, hydrocarbons embedded in it. In theory there is a lot of it, in practice almost no one uses it, because the amount of energy and water needed to dig the rock, cook out the kerogen, crack it into a form usable by the current infrastructure, and transport it to a useful place are extremely high. Every other grand announcement you've been reading follows suit, as does the idea of mining methane hydrates. It is pretty basic math to calculate the amount of recoverable, usable energy from these sources, and you won't be running anything like a developed nation off of it. We will be continuing to move toward less energy use, and there will be nothing slow about it. Less a march than a free-fall.
Elon Musk says lol (Score:2)
That is all.
Peak Oil is now in 2030s (Score:2)
Better article (Score:5, Informative)
It explains that the Japanese found a way to send a pipeline down to the hydrates and depressurize them. This caused some of the released methane to travel up the pipeline they had dropped to the surface, where it could be captured as a gas.
Note it does not say how much of the gas is wasted/escapes into the ocean (which might have some very serious effects). On the other hand, they left most of the ocean pressurized (obviously) so it should hopefully re-sublimate back down to a methane hydrate.
It is actually a real breakthrough, rather than a mere translation problem. That said, a lot matters about efficiency. Merely getting a gallon of methane to the surface is not a huge deal if they have to burn 3/4 of a gallon to get it up (let alone transport it to someplace useful via a pressurized gas transport ship/pipeline).
Only a decade worth (Score:2)
could provide an alternative energy source for the island nation... This is the equivalent of more than a decade of Japan's gas consumption.
So, let's get this straight, the deposit is equivilant to a little over 10 years of Japan's CURRENT gas consumption, and this is being touted as an alternative energy source, especially to combat the loss of energy from loosing two nuclear power plants? Um, okay, not sure how much gas it takes to generate electricity, and not sure how much electricity a gas plant produc
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Couldn't have said it better myself, AC.
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Re:Clarity (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. This is the first offshore demonstration of extraction, but it's been carried out successfully onshore before.
Methane Hydrates and the Future of Natural Gas - MIT Energy.
To date, these permafrost-associated deposits are the only places
where production of gas from verifiable dissociation of gas hydrates has ever been documented.
Short-term (i.e., several days) production tests were carried out at the Mallik well in the
Mackenzie Delta area of Canada in 2002 and 2007 (Dallimore and Collett, 2005; Hancock et al.,
2005; Takahisa, 2005; Kurihara et al., 2008) and at the Mt. Elbert (Milne Point) site on the
Alaskan North Slope in 2008 (e.g., Hunter et al., 2011).
Offshore extraction of NG from hydrates for Japan will be a tough pill to swallow for people whose country was recently trashed by tsunamis, as hydrates are associated with prehistoric massive seabed slumping. Read more here: DOE Meeting Summary: Catastrophic Methane Hydrate Release [global-war...eering.org]
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I should clarify that you were perhaps specifying that this is the first successful offshore test of hydrate extraction.
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Really nice link, its almost enough to make the argument that nature is going to do it for us eventually anyway though. Might as well harness it and put it to good use.
Re:Clarity (Score:5, Informative)
Offshore extraction of NG from hydrates for Japan will be a tough pill to swallow for people whose country was recently trashed by tsunamis, as hydrates are associated with prehistoric massive seabed slumping. Read more here: DOE Meeting Summary: Catastrophic Methane Hydrate Release [global-war...eering.org]
Also known as Clathrate gun [wikipedia.org]
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It's either crappy writing, bad googlefu on my part, or plain old ignorance on my part, but I just don't understand this:
For "tn" I get:
terraNewtons
tons
and a bunch of stuff about Tennessee
But not a lot of stuff directly related to volume.
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Trillion.
1.1 trillion cubic meters
See this list [wikipedia.org] for a sense of how this compares to known reserves.
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Are now designed or were designed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor [wikipedia.org]
There are a LOT of better designs out there now that in a really severe earthquake or storm, would self-compartmentalize.
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I think the other poster was looking for designs that actually work in practice, not theories that haven't panned out yet or tests that were shut down due to failure to perform.
Perhaps someday one of them will be economically feasible. At the moment, it would have to be cheaper than coal, since we idiot hum
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Obviously even multimillion dollar vaults get penetrated from time to time.
I don't think your comparison is valid. What is inside (say money or gold) is desirable enough somebody will risk life and limb break in. Breaking into a Nuclear reactor containment structure, while possible, is not going to contain much in the way of desirable things to take and the risks to life will be pretty high. How many folks would want to break into one, hit their lifetime radiation exposure limits in seconds, and attempt to steal what's inside? And what will they get? Miles of radio active copper
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I can not understand putting a nuke on a beach just as we have done here.
For cooling water, duh!
If there is a nasty leak, as at Fukushima, the isotopes in the water will quickly be dispersed to safe levels.
If the power station had been on a lake or river and suffered a similar loss of cooling incident, the contamination would have been much m ore of a problem.
Further, much of the atmospheric release was blown out to sea.
The coast is not a bad place for a reactor, you just need to make sure the cooling system is as protected from earthquake and innundation as the reactor dome its
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Safe, sustainable and cost effective nuclear power is not only possible but should be our priority!
I'm not suggesting we not use Nuclear power more, we should, but I think there are limits to what Nuclear can do for us at this point. Electricity is not easily stored, in fact, it must be generated the instant it is used. Our electrical consumption varies a lot by the time of day, the season, and location. But Nuclear reactors are not easily throttled up and down on such short cycles. Usually it takes days to plan for and bring a nuclear plant from a low power output up to full power and days to efficien
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Just about all of the recent fossil fuel electric grid additions are natural gas.
These plants are being built mainly because NG prices continue to fall as fracking technology allows the production of more domestic supply. NG is cheap and easy to burn clean. It is also flexible and fairly easy to throttle for peak load if you design your plant for that.
I'm not sure you can build nuclear plants that throttle on 12 - 24 hour cycles very well. Early in the fuel cycle, you can do that kind of thing some and not get yourself in trouble, but as you approach the end of your cycle, power chan
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Because they will perish. ANY source of energy other than fossil combustibles deserves to be promoted.
The fossil fuel mafia is second only to big finance, so the amount of propaganda and misinformation against nuclear or geothermal energy is astounding, and these are the two cleanest and most realistic sources we currently have.
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How do fossil fuels cause rainbows to perish? All you need is humidity and a light source.
I can make a rainbow in a cave 3,000 feet underground.
I can make a rainbow on Mars.
I can make a rainbow while eating green eggs and ham said Sam I Am
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How do fossil fuels cause rainbows to perish? All you need is humidity and a light source.
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
(what good would it be the rainbow if we're not going to see it?)
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Arguing philosophy and perceptions of reality is a very poor fallback argument in this case. Did the universe exist before you were born?
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(ummm, perception you say.... A funny thing this perception...)
My point wasn't at all philosophical: I was just pointing out that a potential catastrophic [wikipedia.org] release of methane from the sea bed could mean every human may have totally other priorities than to admire rainbows (if they'd be able to have priorities at all, I imagine that a dead person couldn't care less about either rainbows or survival).
Here's an analogy: suppose you have a glass of water slowly warming in the sun. Everything is nice and dandy,
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Make a rainbow under an impenetrable cloud canopy that causes massive light ray diffraction before interacting with your mist layer?
Eg, what will happen to earth once enough CO2 is in the atmosphere, since a good deal of water vapor will join it as global temps rise, until cloud cover reaches such a density that the albedo of the clouds causes temps to drop.
Eg, during the ensuing iceage, your rainbows will be a very very rare thing.
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How is combusting methane better than combusting other hydrocarbons?
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That's what I meant.
I see I used a wrong word, though - it turns out in English "fossil fuel" is narrower than what I thought, referring to long-dead organisms only rather than any historic deposits. That's a consequence of learning stuff in a different translation, my bad :/
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How is combusting methane better than combusting other hydrocarbons?
Apparently not what the gp meant, but combusting methane (CH4) is, in fact, better than ethane (C2H6), which is better than propane (C3H8), etc. As the chain gets longer, the ratio of C/H gets higher, resulting in more CO2 being released for the same amount of energy produced.
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Frozen methane is already melting due to global warming and is theorized to greatly accelerate the global warming process. Making using of the stuff and burning it is probably more environmentally friendly than just leaving it there.