[geo] Japan taps gas from methane hydrate
Posters note: this development is significant to geoengineering, as it opens the way to extract methane from unstable clathrates, which may otherwise be released into the atmosphere by global warming. However, it also significantly increases the available stock of carbon fuels. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21752441 Japan taps gas from methane hydrate Updated 24 minutes ago Japan says it has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off its central coast, in a world first. Methane hydrates, or clathrates, are a type of frozen cage of molecules of methane and water. The gas field is about 50km away from Japan's main island, in the Nankai Trough. Researchers say it could provide an alternative energy source for Japan which imports all its energy needs. Other countries including Canada, the US and China have been looking into ways of exploiting methane hydrate deposits as well. Pilot experiments in recent years, using methane hydrates found under land ice, have shown that methane can be extracted from the deposits. Offshore deposits present a potentially enormous source of methane but also some environmental concern, because the underwater geology containing them is unstable in many places. It is the world's first offshore experiment producing gas from methane hydrate, an official from the economy, trade and industry ministry told the AFP news agency. A survey of the gas field is being run by state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC). Engineers used a depressurisation method that turns methane hydrate into methane gas. Production tests are expected to continue for about two weeks. Government officials have said that they aim to establish methane hydrate production technologies for practical use within five years. A Japanese study estimated that at least 1.1tn cubic metres of methane hydrate exist in offshore deposits. This is the equivalent of more than a decade of Japan's gas consumption. Japan has few natural resources and the cost of importing fuel has increased after a backlash against nuclear power following the Fukushima nuclear disaster two years ago. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture and storage OR Sea Urchins May Save the World
I have a copy I got from Dr. Siller. She said I could send it to anyone I felt like. I didn't ask for and don't have her permission to post a copy for public access. Anyone wishing to see the paper, email me. On Sunday, March 10, 2013 9:05:17 PM UTC-7, Greg Rau wrote: Anyone have an e-copy of Siller and Bhaduri? Still unclear how catalysts are a panacea for CO2 air capture. There still needs to be a chemical driving force that transfers gas into solution and keeps it there. Adding CA, nano particles, etc to water doesn't magically consume CO2. You've got to remove acid or add base to the solution to drive the reaction. If you are talking about mitigating point sources, then obviously pCO2 flue gas pCO2 water is the driving force. Then keeping it in solution requires some additional chemistry like adding a base. If minerals are added as the base, carbonates would be must preferred over silicates because of CO2 reaction kinetics. I can't imagine CO2 hydration being the rate limiting step in most silicate weathering, so unclear how a hydration catalyst helps here, but i should read the paper. -Greg -- *From:* geoengi...@googlegroups.com javascript: [ geoengi...@googlegroups.com javascript:] on behalf of David Lewis [ jrando...@gmail.com javascript:] *Sent:* Thursday, March 07, 2013 3:38 PM *To:* geoengi...@googlegroups.com javascript: *Subject:* [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture and storage OR Sea Urchins May Save the World I was interested that Siller and Bhaduri, authors of this nickel nanoparticle paper, compared what they think nickel nanoparticles can do * favorably* to what carbonic anhydrase can do. A discussion of the properties and significance of carbonic anhydrase is located on the Stanford website, i.e. at the Global Climate and Energy Project, i.e. in this Jennifer Wilcox Carbon Capture 101 Tutorialhttp://vimeo.com/30557085. Wilcox devotes most of the tutorial discussing the best CO2 capture chemistry presently commercially available, i.e. amine chemistry. * * As an aside, she brought up carbonic anhydrase at minute 34:30. A transcript: There is a special case called carbonic anhydrase. This is an enzyme. This is how we filter out CO2 in our own bodies. So this is present in the red blood cells of mammals. And essentially carbonic anhydrase is a zinc based enzyme and you can see here there are three histadine groups surrounding the zinc. And you have water associated with it. In solution, the proton will go into solution and so you have this hydroxyl group directly bound to the zinc and so what ends up happening is that OH will hydrate CO2. So [garbled] its carbonate interaction with the OH of the zinc, and the interesting aspect about this is that it occurs about ten orders of magnitude faster. So CO2 to bicarbonate formation is up to ten orders of magnitude faster than CO2 in aqueous solution without anything added. That's just in water. * It can be anywhere from four to six orders of magnitude greater than amine chemistry - for forming carbonate from CO2. So it's a pretty significant enzyme*. Currently though the source is questionable, where we can get this, since it is only available in red blood cells. And, you know, that's limited. So there are a lot of groups - there's a group at Columbia, there's a group at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, working on synthetically making carbonic anhydrase as additives for the absorption process for separation. I asked Siller for a description of the speed she and Bhaduri observed nickel could catalyse CO2 to carbonic acid, in the terms Wilcox uses, i.e. compared to CO2 in water, and/or compared to amine chemistry, i.e. CO2 and amines in water. Her reply: We have tried to determine the rates of conversion of CO2 to acid by nickel nanoparticles with stop-flow technique to compare them with carbonic anhydrase from the literature - however we have problems since nobody before us did not work (sic) on this system and if we just copy literature and try to use reagents which are used for CO2 capture by carbonic anhydrase... the measured rates are unreliable So we are trying to find the right reagents for kinetic measurements. I asked Klaus Lackner for his reaction about the importance of this discovery that nickel acts similarly to carbonic anhydrase. He commented on the Siller/Bhaduri plan to remove carbonic acid as it forms so the nickel can continually produce more, by using olivine: Keep in mind that other people have used bicarbonate brines to digest olivine and they were rate limited too. These processes which start with bicarbonate ions in the water end up being severely rate limited even though they simply ignored the question of how to get the CO2 in the
[geo] Re: Japan taps gas from methane hydrate
Andrew, Note that there have been proposals to displace the methane in hydrates with CO2 and thus store the CO2 as a hydrate - here is an example: *http://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12690.full*http://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12690.full Chris. On Tuesday, 12 March 2013 11:10:09 UTC, andrewjlockley wrote: Posters note: this development is significant to geoengineering, as it opens the way to extract methane from unstable clathrates, which may otherwise be released into the atmosphere by global warming. However, it also significantly increases the available stock of carbon fuels. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21752441 Japan taps gas from methane hydrate Updated 24 minutes ago Japan says it has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off its central coast, in a world first. Methane hydrates, or clathrates, are a type of frozen cage of molecules of methane and water. The gas field is about 50km away from Japan's main island, in the Nankai Trough. Researchers say it could provide an alternative energy source for Japan which imports all its energy needs. Other countries including Canada, the US and China have been looking into ways of exploiting methane hydrate deposits as well. Pilot experiments in recent years, using methane hydrates found under land ice, have shown that methane can be extracted from the deposits. Offshore deposits present a potentially enormous source of methane but also some environmental concern, because the underwater geology containing them is unstable in many places. It is the world's first offshore experiment producing gas from methane hydrate, an official from the economy, trade and industry ministry told the AFP news agency. A survey of the gas field is being run by state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC). Engineers used a depressurisation method that turns methane hydrate into methane gas. Production tests are expected to continue for about two weeks. Government officials have said that they aim to establish methane hydrate production technologies for practical use within five years. A Japanese study estimated that at least 1.1tn cubic metres of methane hydrate exist in offshore deposits. This is the equivalent of more than a decade of Japan's gas consumption. Japan has few natural resources and the cost of importing fuel has increased after a backlash against nuclear power following the Fukushima nuclear disaster two years ago. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
