According to this Popular Science article, Japan has figured out how to extract offshore methane ice, and in theory be able to begin commercial extraction of significant methane in the next 5 years or so (‘hopefully’…I realize that this article is thin on facts, and that most of this is still pie in the sky, but let’s pretend that this is real and viable for the sake of the debate):
Other countries are also looking into this technology. For debate, what is this going to do for global climate change? My understanding is that methane is actually a bigger GhG than CO2, and that if we start serious extraction of deep sea methane ice reserves it could have a very detrimental effect on the environment. On the other hand, countries like Japan currently import huge amounts of oil, since they have very little natural reserves, and this could seriously help them with their own energy equation, especially since they have decided to back away from nuclear energy. Methane hydrates are one of the really huge and mostly untapped energy reserves on the planet and could propel a new level of technological development…but, at what cost to the environment already stressed by global climate change due to our already heavy use of fossil fuels? How could/will commercial extraction and wide scale use of methane hydrates affect the already precarious equation? I don’t see any realistic way to halt Japan (and others who are surly close to their own abilities to do this) from extracting and using the stuff, so the real question is…what will the price be for doing this, and will the benefits outweigh the costs?
Global warming may release methane from hydrate deposits. See “methane gun”. Burning it to CO2 is preferred, but I don’t know how unstable these deposits are.
You seem to be assuming that there will be a lot of methane released into the atmosphere. Once it’s burned you’re just released the usual CO2 and other combustion by-products you always get from burning fossil fuels. Unless the new process results in the release of a lot of methane into the atmosphere I don’t see what difference it’s going to make.
AFAIU, methane released into the atmosphere lasts only about a decade or so before being destroyed in the troposphere or stratosphere. CO2 lasts something on the order of 100-200 years.
Well…yes, that would be my assumption. Leaving aside how the warming of the planet is going to be releasing quite a bit of methane naturally, I’d have to guess (WAG for sure) that any extraction of methane ice from (unstable afaik) undersea deposits is going to be releasing quite a bit of methane into the atmosphere as well.
And using it as a fuel source is going to produce CO2 (assuming we burn it…there are alternatives to using methane that don’t require burning, but not sure what the by product would be), plus there is going to invariably be leaks as well, which is also going to be releasing a non-zero amount into the atmosphere.
Maybe I’m over reacting to the potential amounts going into the atmosphere, in which case we could just focus on all the new CO2 going up instead, which is also going to have an impact on global climate change, right?
Less than average. Methane has less carbon than oil, and a lot less than coal. So if you replace coal and oil consumption with methane consumption then you end up with less CO2 in the atmosphere. All fossil fuels are hydrocarbons (well coal is mostly just carbon) burning turns the hydro(gen) into water and the carbon into CO2. The more hydrogen you add to the mix, the cleaner the fuel will burn.
Ok, I have no idea how they extract this methane, but if I understand correctly unless they decrease the pressure or raise the temperature of the deposits then it won’t be released. As far as burning it, they’re going to get the energy from somewhere. They won’t be building new nuclear reactors in Japan for a while, so unless they have a solar, wind, or geothermal solution they’ll be buring something and producing CO2.
So no doubt there will be some leaks, just as there are from traditional mining for fossil fuels, and it will produce CO2 when it’s burned, but we’ll need more details to see if this is different from the consumption of any fossil fuel.
Coal produces about 200 lbs of CO2 per million BTU produced, natural gas produces about 117 pounds. So that is a pretty good advancement, albeit not an end goal.
CO2 is 20-30% lower in natural gas cars than in gasoline cars (according to that pro-natural gas site).
My fear is what if there is a spill? The BP issue showed we could really fuck ourselves, one of the big fears of global warming is that all the trillions of tons of methane trapped in ice will be released and cause out of control global warming. Supposedly that is part of what caused the great extinction 250 million years ago, runaway climate change leading to methane releases (from what I remember).
Well, it could have the potentially beneficial effect of helping to jump start the methanol economy which, once established, could gradually transition to much more preferable sources, and then ultimately using clean, renewable energy to make it out of CO2.
