To quote myself... wrote:Shallow thinker wrote:Clathrates... ...Better to burn it before it melts on it's own from global warming
It seems that just the opposite is true.
Clathrates protect us from "Iceball Earth" scenarios. Clathrates structures are more pressure sensitive then temperature sensitive. When water is deposited on land as glaciers during an ice age, sea levels fall. This destabilizes millions of years of Clathrate deposits and helps to flip the climate back into a warm cycle. At least there is a strong possibility of this.
Simply Put: Clathrates in melting permafrost contribute to global warming immensely. But Clatrates underwater protect us from death by permanent ice age. So it is quite possible that if we do find a way to harness this energy, then it's a real devils bargain we're getting into.
Lindsey Grant wrote:Clathrates. For completeness, let me mention the last faint hope of those who cling to the fossil era. Clathrates are globules of ice and methane widely distributed on the continental shelves of the world’s oceans, and in the tundra. It is a highly dispersed resource. To disturb the clathrates is to pose the danger of releasing the methane (which is a potent greenhouse gas) or possibly generating mudslides and tsunamis on the sloping continental shelf in the mining process, and large scale dredging would inflict damage on marine fisheries beyond anything that fishing trawlers have yet inflicted.
The scientific consensus seems to be that clathrates are a highly uncertain and potentially disruptive source of energy, but Japan in its tireless search for energy has led at least two expeditions to see if the methane can be captured.
http://www.npg.org/forum_series/fall04forum2.html
Frozen gas hydrates which lies just below the seabed deep off New Zealand's East Coast may contain a future resource of over 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, says Stuart Henrys, a senior research scientist at GNS Science.
Research shows that sheets of gas hydrates, made up of ice-like crystals of water and methane molecules intermixed with sediments, are found over 50,000 sq km from offshore Marlborough to offshore Gisborne.
In the future, natural gas derived from chunks of ice that workers collect from beneath the ocean floor and beneath the arctic permafrost may fuel cars, heat homes, and power factories. Government researchers are reporting that these so-called "gas hydrates," a frozen form of natural gas that bursts into flames at the touch of a match, show increasing promise as an abundant, untapped source of clean, sustainable energy.
“For more than 25 years, the USGS has conducted gas hydrate research in northern Alaska, showing the investment of our agency in understanding this resource,” said USGS Director Mark Myers. “This is especially important now that a growing body of evidence indicates that concentrated gas hydrate accumulations in conventional hydrocarbon reservoirs, such as those in northern Alaska, can be produced with existing technology.”
Among the various techniques for production of natural gas from gas hydrates, depressurization appears to be the most promising method. This involves changing the pressure of the hydrate accumulation, which changes the resource from a solid state into components of gas and water that can be produced to the surface. Depressurization was the only production technique assessed in this estimate.
Tyler_JC wrote:Clean?
We're talking about methane hydrates. AKA, natural gas in solid form.
There might be fewer particulate emissions but we're still talking about a huge quantity of carbon dioxide and methane.
We would still have serious climate change problems.
OilFinder2 wrote:I think this is the crux of these Alaskan deposits:“For more than 25 years, the USGS has conducted gas hydrate research in northern Alaska, showing the investment of our agency in understanding this resource,” said USGS Director Mark Myers. “This is especially important now that a growing body of evidence indicates that concentrated gas hydrate accumulations in conventional hydrocarbon reservoirs, such as those in northern Alaska, can be produced with existing technology.”
Among the various techniques for production of natural gas from gas hydrates, depressurization appears to be the most promising method. This involves changing the pressure of the hydrate accumulation, which changes the resource from a solid state into components of gas and water that can be produced to the surface. Depressurization was the only production technique assessed in this estimate.
In other words, these particular hydrates are locked up in all the oil and gas fields on the North Slope - in addition to the regular oil and gas. Apparently hydrates need not always be located on an ocean floor.
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