63 comments on Update on US GOM: Methane Hydrates
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63 comments on Update on US GOM: Methane Hydrates
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Leave the clathrates alone. Attempting to exploit them may destabilize them. They aren't an economically viable energy source anyway. They may play a geophysical or ecological role we don't understand.
You are drowning and someone throws you a rope but you don't reach for it for fear of dragging them in.
You're right--the world would be better off if you were dead.
Seems you don't understand we are in a climate crisis AND an energy crisis, both which methane hydrates can address in a major way.
"God helps those who help themselves"--Ben Franklin
Ok, "you" are drowning...and NOBODY throws you a rope. That's where you are today. Methane Hydrates are NOT a rope that will rescue you. Power down.....do the world a favor. It's our only hope.
Respectfully, we are in neither a climate or energy crisis. We are in a human crisis, trying desperately to support far too many beyond a sustainable level, with a huge effort to support an extraordinary standard of living and continue business as usual and return to perpetual growth. We are frantically grasping at straws in an attempt to sustain the un-sustainable. Just because potential resources may be available to prolong our over-consuming life styles a little bit longer, does that mean we must exploit them? At some point in the future we must power down and learn to be content with less.How do we benefit by prolonging the day of reckoning?
You may well be too intelligent, informed, & wise for this forum e. j. ;)
"At some point in the future we must power down and learn to be content with less."
Hey, a lot of Europeans, Japanese and Americans could do with less and still be living better than the richest lived only a few centuries ago...but "less" will be a hard sell in the third and developing world for millions of people who have never known "enough", much less "more".
RC
"the world would be better off if you were dead."
Too much coffee this morning, maj?
...and the devil take the hindmost:
http://pulitzerphotos.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/baby-stalked-by-vulture-i...
Majorian, I really don't see how methane hydrates can help fight against climate change. They can only generate more methane or more CO2 in the atmosphere.
About fighting future energy crises by means of methane hydrates (I'm afraid it's too late to fight the present crisis this way), let's see. Why not research the matter? It is true that using methane hydrates as an energy source could become just a medicine to "prolong the agony", or it could provide some additional time to find alternative solutions. But we should never be afraid of researching.
At least give him a bit of credit, he was taking about capturing & sequestering the methane-hydrate derived CO2. I don't know how hard it is to capture, but apparently methane hydrates are eager to convert into CO2 hydrates, if you pump CO2 into them. That might be a way to obtain carbon neutral energy. Of course there is a major devil in the details. Can we produce from the hydrates? Can we economically capture the CO2 from the carbon in the methane? Can we reasonably and safely dispose of it? But, at least that was what he was proposing.
If we could do that, it would be a good thing, as these hydrates -if they are abundant enough, constitute a potential global warming time bomb. Neutralizing them ought to be a good thing.
Well,
methane hydrates produce methane(natural gas). Burning 1 million BTUs of natural gas for energy produces 117 pounds of CO2.
Burning 1 million BTUs of oil for energy produces 160 pounds of CO2.
Burning 1 million BTUs of bituminous coal for energy will produce 205# of CO2.
Take the US for example;
we burn 22000 million million BTUs of coal
plus
40000 million million BTUs of oil
plus
23000 million million BTUs of natural gas
for energy.
This totals
117/2000 x 23E9 + 160/2000 x 40E9 + 205/2000 x 22E9=
6,800,500,000 tons of CO2.
If all our energy came from natural gas,
117/2000 x (23 + 40 + 22)E9 = 4,972,500,000 tons of CO2.
our CO2 from energy would be reduced by 27%.
The next step would be to convert the natural gas to hydrogen gas(as we do making fertilizer) and burying the resulting CO2 emitting 0% CO2 to the atmosphere.
But you will surely object,
Why bother do anything?
Just stop using energy!
This is like saying the way to stop a famine is for everyone to starve to death.
I'd save that bit of cleverness for Plan B, if solutions like methane hydrates somehow don't materialize. In fact, by not acting we are heading for Plan B.
You are ignoring the energy cost of the conversion to hydrogen.
Actually, it's largely irrelevant, but here are my figures.
CH4 + H2O -->CO + 3H2: Reformating methane
Yes, there is a penalty in converting natural gas to hydrogen and then also sequestering the CO2(you forgot to mention).
The thermal conversion of natural gas to hydrogen is 65% efficient.
The energy required to capture CO2 from natural gas
is about 300 kwh per ton.
http://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/David_and_Herzog.pdf
A CCS NG power plant would need 6.3 cubic feet of gas to produce 1 kwh of electricity and would produce .37 kg of CO2 per kwh for sequestration.
So 1 million tons of hydrogen would take 200 billion cubic feet of natural gas
1E6 x 126000/65% = 194 Gcf ~200 Gcf for 1 million tons of hydrogen
which would produce 10.6 million tons of CO2
which would require 4.0 Twh of electric power from a NG CCS power plant,
which in turn would require an additional 25 billion cubic feet of natural gas
bringing it up to 225 Gcf for 1 million tons of hydrogen.
The US uses 120 billion gallons of gasoline which is the energy equivalent of 120 million tons of hydrogen.
Multiplying by 120, we get an additional NG demand of 27 Tcf (120 x 225E9= 27 Tcf or 27 quads)
for zero emission hydrogen reformated from gas hydrate.
The US gas infrastructure transmits 23 Tcf per year now.
By efficiency this would beat petroleum as we currently use 29 quads of oil for transport versus
27 quads of hydrogen described above.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/energybasics101.html
If TENS OF THOUSANDS of Tcfs of gas hydrates are available,
then this seems like a no-brainer with 50 Tcf per year of demand, lasting CENTURIES.
Less energy used 27 Tcf (NG to H2) < 29 Tcf oil.
Greater ultimate resource than oil.
ZERO CO2-emissions.
QED
"This is like saying the way to stop a
famineobesity epidemic is for everyone tostarve to deathgo on a diet."There, fixed that for you. ;-)
Similarly, BAU is like saying the way to avoid a hangover is to never sober up.
Majorian, it is true that methane generates less CO2 per unit energy than coal or oil. Substituting coal or oil by methane hydrates could perhaps reduce the amount of CO2 if we forget about how much energy is required to convert methane hydrates in the bottom of the ocean into usable fuel.
The problem is that methane hydrates would not substitute oil. We (the world) will burn the same total amount of oil with methane hydrates or without them. How much oil is that? It is ALL the extractable oil beneath the ground.
Thus, more methane hydrates, more CO2.
T
No.
Methane hydrates are drilled like coalbed methane gas wells which about 10% of US natural gas is drilled like that now.
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2008/04/23/a-brea...
It's true that we would need long pipelines and lots of wells but recent unconventional gas production has risen greatly with the new technology, so
the energy penalty must not be too bad.
I repeat--the idea would be to turn methane into hydrogen and bury the CO2, so no CO2 emitted.
There's no reason you couldn't convert your car to hydrogen gas,
or buy the BMW Hydrogen 7.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykl2PH2B-tM&feature=related
I'm intrigued by the sheer range and depth of your wishful thinking with regard to utilizing Methyl Clathrates.
Despite the present lack of commercial scale exploitation, despite >50 years drillers' experience of clathrates, you blithely assume that issues both of practicality and of commercial viability will be overcome - in an era of destabilizing climatic conditions and of ever tightening finance services.
You then blithely assume that the methane produced will be carbon free as a/. it won't be burnt in any vehicles before its carbon's removal, and b/. CCS will again overcome both its insuperable practical difficulties, as well as the massive energy & financial costs, of the sheer scale of global CO2 flues' output needing to be captured, compressed, piped untold distances and then pumped into geology whose impermeability is beyond question.
Yet to me the most curious of your opinions is that you do not view the critical risk of disturbing clathrate formations as being worth even discussing. As has been made clear in posts on this thread, even a minute fraction of a conservative seabed clathrate reserve would be sufficient, without any other feedback loop's interaction, to initiate the catastrophic self-fuelling greenhouse effect.
All of which you choose to ignore.
Which seems to me a degree of irresponsibility way beyond dumbness, particularly given the plausible structure of your posts.
So could you please divulge to us just what your interest is that drives such a dubious fervour on behalf of Methyl Clathrates' exploitation ?
Regards,
Backstop
It looks as if we will disturb them either way-burning then is probably less hazardous than simply freeing them up by means of the green house effect.
This of course gets into the realm of geo-engineering, which brings up a number of practical and moral problems (moral hazard not the least).
Because some will likely be/are now being disturbed does not imply that we should go out disturbing more.
"Those wasps are almost sure to bite me eventually, so I might as well start hitting their nest now to kill as many as I can." Given our level of ignorance about these deposits, that may be about the right analogy for your approach.
Which gets us back around to the unintended geo-engineering project already well underway: dig up all the buried carbon and burn it as fast as we can. And let the hydrates do whatever it is they will naturally do with a 5°C temperature rise.
In the last 150 years we have released 50% of all the carbon naturally sequestered as oil over the last billion years or so. The geo-engineering experiment can't be stopped or reversed. It's going to play out to its conclusion, whatever that might be. Anyone who assumes business as usual is going to be grossly wrong. The only question is where are we headed, something our species is not terribly adept at determining with any degree of accuracy based upon historical analysis of past guesses.
Counter-earth, on the opposite side of the sun, is exactly like Earth except that it has no people on it. Counter-earth serves as the control for this geo-engineering experiment we are preforming. Alas that it isn't a larger sample size than this.