I was reading this article about methane being seen in what appears to be very large quantities seeping up out of the Arctic Ocean by Russian scientists.
I know from discussions on this that methane is a much stronger green house gas than CO2, so I realize how serious this is. My question though, is this…couldn’t we be harvesting and using this gas for energy? Since it’s escaping anyway, and since it seems like we are talking about a hell of a lot of methane here (with more to come, if I’m understanding the situation correctly), wouldn’t this make for at least a little bit of a silver lining here? You could use methane in fuel cells, or use it in similar ways to how we use natural gas, right?
Just curious if anyone is looking into the possibility of harnessing this stuff, or if it’s even commercially feasible to do so. I know that this is all part of global warming, and it’s certainly serious (and scary), but it’s happening, and it seems like we could take advantage of this aspect to develop technologies that would at least use methane that’s being released, since it’s going into the atmosphere already. No?
If it’s continuously coming up in 1000 meter circles I’d imagine you wouldn’t have to harvest it from the sea floor. I assume it’s a lot, or the scientists wouldn’t be so concerned (methane always out gasses in lakes and the ocean, but this seems more exceptional).
Is it a useful enough fuel source to make the problems of harvesting it, especially in the Arctic, worthwhile? This isn’t like installing an oil rig and just pumping a steady flow for years on end, I gather.
Sure, why not? Or some sort of semi-submerged bell, that would feed the gas into a ship or something of the sort. Or, they could get engineers and experts to design something a bit more formidable than what I can come up with in 10 seconds of thought. The way I read it was:
Continuous, powerful out-gassing more than 1000 meters (that’s huge) in diameter. And they found 100’s of these ‘torch’ sites in a relatively small 10,000 square mile (bit disconcerting when they go from English units to metric there) area.
The way I see it is like this: It would be like a smoker that knows that he/she will get cancer 20 years from now and seeing that it is inevitable will smoke more, and then dies of emphysema 10 years in the future instead.
Because this seems to be missing from the OP:
Yes, it is bad that there is almost no effort to control the emissions today, but whatever we can imagine that it will be bad in the future because of the warming, we can imagine even worse outcomes if we shrug and decide that we can emit even more just because an expected bad (but manageable IMHO) future will come, that is a recipe for the worst probable outcomes to become more likely in the future (and make the future to be even less manageable).
But methane is already out-gassing, correct? And frankly I don’t see anything that’s going to even slow down our output of CO2, not just in the US but world wide. So, the question is, would harvesting and using methane that’s already out-gassing from places like the Arctic be useful? Would it be more harmful to use the stuff than just letting it naturally out-gas into the atmosphere? I know that you think what we should be doing is preventing this from happening, and to a certain degree I agree…I freely acknowledge it’s a problem, it’s happening and we are one of the primary causes for global warming/global climate change…but assume that it’s going to happen for the sake of the thread and tell me if it would be worse to use the stuff that’s already coming up in such quantities (and whether what is coming up is even economically useful), or whether using it would be neutral (i.e. it’s already coming up so using it in fuel cells or in power plants would be no worse than just letting it out-gas). That’s the question I’m asking here.
If you read Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth you would see that the methane release has been hyped by certain media sources and has actually been going on for thousands of years.
You are still assuming that we can not make it worse, we can by increasing the leakage just by following the assumption that we would exploit the sources of methane mentioned also.
Maybe useful. Probably not economic. It’s damnably hard to harvest hydrocarbons in adverse environments. Even if the technical challenges were solved (and they’re a bit harder than you seem to think), the cost of recovery is almost certainly more than the return you’d get, especially when logistical costs are added.
This isn’t just true for the Arctic for for many more conventional sources. Several reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico just aren’t worth tapping until and unless the price of oil reaches a certain point and stays higher. Ditto tar sands and such. West Texas has seen a recent resurgence due to higher prices making marginal or dying wells profitable again (in addition to frakking, which is a 'hole other kettle of fish).
Your cites didn’t address the questions I was asking though, at least not the parts I skimmed. If you want to quote the parts that directly address the questions I’d be grateful.
I’m asking if the gas that’s currently out-gassing in areas like the Arctic would be economically useful to harvest, and as a sub-question whether using this gas that is already out-gassing would be beneficial, harmful or neutral to the environment. Full stop. Any additional assumptions that we’d exploit non-out-gassing resources are yours and aren’t part of what I’m asking. If using the gas that is ALREADY GOING INTO THE ATMOSPHERE would do more harm then simply say so and explain why to my non-climatological mind. If it would not be economically feasible to harvest the gas that is already going into the atmosphere, like Great Antibob is indicating, then simply say that and explain why (I thought his explanation reasonable…I’m certain that it would be more complex and costly than my 10 seconds of thought on it earlier, especially considering the environment we are talking about).
Revkin has been caught missing the point before and he is not an expert.
But if he is more on the money there, for the purposes of the current discussion, then that leads one to say even more strongly that exploiting that methane is not a good idea, because leakage and more releases than what will happen in nature are to be expected.
Its economics. Methane is not very easy to transport for use outside of the immediate area. So either you have a gas pipeline from the middle of the ocean to some place where people will use it and hope that the revenue from the gas will offset the cost of building and operating the extraction and pipeline or you can build a nearby liquification plant that will freeze the methane into liquid form and then you can ship it to somelpace where they have a plant that can regasify the methane and pump it into pipelines. The problem is that the only way to keep the gas liquified is to let some of it evaporate during teh trip. This limits the transportation range of the liquified natural gas and depending on where the gas so you are hoping that the liquified natural gas is close enough to a palce where they want to buy it that you can offset teh cost of the extraction and liquification plant.
If it was economically viable there would already be an extraction operation in place.
The first paragraph is true, though it doesn’t necessarily follow that there would already be an extraction operation in place now if these things were just discovered.
If it is possible to collect this gas and use it, it would have a net benefit GHG wise even if all you did was burn it. Converting the methane directly into CO2 is in the short term preferable to letting it release into the air as methane, and I think in the long term (over several decades) it will end up being the same, as I believe the methane will eventually break down into CO2 anyways.
As for your question xstime about how useful it would be, it is in fact pretty much natural gas - however a typical natural gas operation usually involves collecting gas that’s already been highly compressed from a concentrated source (a well) - collecting relatively low-pressure gas bubbles over a huge area is quite a different undertaking and probably orders of magnitude more expensive per unit of energy that you’re recovering (just a WAG).
Well, first of all we aren’t going to increase leakage by capturing methane that is already escaping into the atmosphere. The discussion of increased leakage is in response to the prospect of drilling the already sequestered gas out of the ground.
Re: Capturing at the surface - The closest comparison woudl be to the pig farmers excrement ponds where an enormous tarp covers the pond, and captures the methane for future use. The idea of doing this over large swaths of roiling ocean is obviously flawed.
But the answer to what is causing the off-gassing might yield a better solution. Is there just a huge batch of muck rotting away which could easily be trawled up like guano and set into a series of tanks to produce the gas? Or is the temperature change at a certain point causing existing methane to outgas from the incoming water?
The fact that the areas are round is intriguing. Is there a large vent that indicates where a natural gas well could be drilled? Gas released under pressure at a central point deep ont he ocean floor could be rising in a cone shape to create what they are seeing at the surface.
My first thought at seeing this was: Baby oil fields! Tomorrows gasoline forming today.
*Bonus question, could all those ships that used to get lost over the arctic seas be explained by crews being suffocated in a methane field?
Natural gas is methane. You would literally use it in the exact same way since it is the same thing.
I’m sure they could capture it; however, that would not be the issue with the economics of the venture: it would be transporting it. How would you expect to transport that natural gas anywhere? You would probably have to use a floating LNG liquefaction vessel as a pipeline is not going to be feasible. Not a chance something like that would be economic unless you are talking about a several TCF type project.
I read the link you gave and you seem to miss the point. Eric Stieg disagrees with Roger Pielke, Jr who Revkin quotes. The point is neither Steig nor Pielke are experts in that area of climate science, so they are expressing their opinions in an area where neither are experts. Frankly I would pay a lot more attention to something Gavin Schmidt posted on this topic in Real Climate than Stieg. Frankly I would pay more opinion to what Pielke Sr said on this topic than his son.
Climate Science is a very broad field and you need to pay attention to whether the scientist in question is an expert in the area in question. Many scientists are amazingly ignorant outside their own specialty.
In relation to the OP, you probably don’t want to talk to a climate scientist at all. You need someone who has expertise in harvesting energy from diffuse sources. They could probably do a back of the envelope calculation about whether what the OP proposes is possible or not. I would lean toward David MacKay myself.
The methane was trapped (as a clathrate) in a frozen frothy muckj-ice of some sxort which was stable at the temperature and pressure of the Arctic seabed – but not any more (cf effects of climate change on the Arctic Ocean). The methane is being released as the frozen muck thaws, in tiny bubbles over a wide swath of ocean, in the closest thing to non-point-source release I can come up with on a quick runthrough of ideas. As far as actually capturing the methane for use as fuel goes, you would literally be further ahead sticking balloons on cows’ anuses.
The way I read it was: