 | The Bullroarer - Wednesday 12 March 2008 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | A Gas To Liquids Plant For the North West Shelf ? |  |
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That article about methane hydrates is bizarre.
Has anyone seen a real world example of these being harvested and used yet ?
So far its still in the realm of science fiction from what I can tell...
"technology to extract methane for industry from gigantic bubbles deep in the ocean is only a few years away."
And fusion power is only thirty years away, too. And the air car will revolutionise personal transport, once it's built. And the next generation nuclear reactors will be clean and safe and impossible to use to get bomb material. And the US plans to put men on Mars.
There's some stuff that's always going to be just a few years away.
I wonder if, when referring to "bubbles", they mean pingos... remember them?
Methane now bubbling from Beaufort Sea
Anomalies caused by ancient event
Updated
A search of the GNS website referred to in the link has some information on the gas hydrate research
What are gas hydrates? <= nice structure and phase diagrams
Energy resource
Useful links
I remember the PLF's - Wayne Madsen turned them into a tinfoil horror story back when that news item came out :-)
I like the NZ diagrams.
I'll just add the link to the USGS stability diagram as it is even clearer.
It's a good thing that these formations are deep and that water has a high heat capacity.... It'll probably take a long time for surface heat to penetrate to that depth... especially if/as(?) the oceans stratify...
And the consequences if it goes wrong would be part way between science fiction and horror.
Well - from a global warming point of view it would be disastrous even if it went "right" - the volume of hydrocarbons in the hydrates dwarfs that of other fossil fuels.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2008/01/warning-signs-on-ocean-floor.html
O yea of little faith... how could poking a 1000m long stick at a potentially unstable geochemical formation under the sea possibly go wrong?!
;-)