The Ice Meth Cometh - Chemical & Engineering News

[hatrack]

EDIT

USGS estimates there are as many as 49,000 quadrillion cu ft of hydrate-based gas reserves throughout the world’s oceans and up to 12,000 quadrillion cu ft on land, though estimates vary wildly. Conventional reserves are estimated at 13,000 quadrillion cu ft.

With a deepening gas crisis in the U.S., hope is increasingly being put on methane hydrates. In a speech on energy policy this spring before the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association’s annual meeting, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan noted their promise as a source of energy that is “perhaps a generation or two away.”

We don’t necessarily have to wait that long, says Arthur H. Johnson, president of Hydrate Energy International (HEI) and adjunct research professor in Tulane University’s department of chemical and biomolecular engineering. He says commercial production of natural gas from hydrates could be only three to five years away. But he jokes that “10 years from now, it could still be three to five years out.”

Recovering hydrates isn’t simply a matter of designing a ship that will dredge up the mounds on the sea floor, Johnson says. He calls this idea economically “dicey” and environmentally impossible, given the complex ecosystems associated with the hydrates. And, he notes, drilling too close to the mounds is illegal in the U.S. anyway.

“What we need is a reservoir rock very similar to what we need with conventional oil and gas development,” Johnson says—rock such as sandstone with methane hydrates dispersed in the pore space. Such rock would also have to be in “the hydrate stability zone,” where there are low temperatures and high pressures, but not so deep that geothermal energy prevents hydrate formation.

These factors whittle down the amount of commercially recoverable hydrates. “It is not how many molecules of hydrate there are in the world,” he says. “It is where it is concentrated in sufficient volume that you can commercially produce it and get commercial volumes out.”

For example, Collett estimates there are about 1.3 quadrillion cu ft of methane in the Blake Outer Ridge off the coast of the Carolinas. Johnson notes, however, “The problem is that the rock is an extremely tight shale.” He says, moreover, that there is a low percentage of hydrates in that rock, submerged under two miles of ocean and with no pipeline infrastructure to take the gas to shore. “There is no way you are going to produce that,” he says.

Although Johnson calls the big numbers associated with hydrates mostly hype, more realistic estimates are still impressive. “You are still talking thousands of trillion cubic feet but not hundreds of thousands. You are still looking at a potential resource that is perhaps an order of magnitude greater than the conventional gas resource,” he says.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/83/i34/8334ebus1.html

[NNadir]

1. Oh good. Surfing in Antarctica.

I wonder how the Beach Boys songs will translate to the Antarctic Coast.

[phantom power]

2. Would it really be so horrible to just start building some wind-farms?

These people will do anything to keep burning fossil fuels.

I've read some speculation that messing around with the methane hydrate beds might set off a massive release of methane. Nothing good would come of that.

[Coastie for Truth]

3. There is some work reported on Methane Hydrates

in "US Coast Guard, Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Safety Council", back in the late 1960's-early 1970's (I was a "LT(jg)-flunkie-gofer" on the project; drew some of the figures in those pre-historic days before PowerPoint - what did we do before PowerPoint?).

My own reading leads me to believe that methane hydrate is J-T expanded gas jets escaping from sub-sea petroleum and coal deposits - kind of like "swamp gas" and "coal mine gas" and the methane in crude fields.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. That's going to be tough to collect

Isn't the energy density per volume rather low? It would be only slightly more efficient than sticking tubes up everyone's ass to collect the methane in farts.

Still, I could be missing something here.

In the long run, we have to deal with the greenhouse gas problem (unless we've managed to induce a Heinrich event and flip the climate into a renewed glacial mode) and in the longer run, how to deal with living on a finite planet. The only place we'll be able to enjoy a limitless 3-5% growth per annum is outer space, and there's about two generations' worth of engineering that needs to be completed before we can even set up prototype habitats dedicated to manufacturing.

We're looking at a minimum of fifty years of relative austerity. Whether those fifty years are spent profitably and pleasantly, or under conditions of stark poverty and misery, is another "engineering detail". And we're rather short on the kind of patience required for working out the details.

--p!