At 4:00 PM 1/31/5, John Steck wrote: >Anyway to safely tap/deplete these enormous energy reserves then? Glass >half full...? >-john
Yes, the glass is half full, if we have enough time to drink from it. A week ago I would have said that it is a reasonable speculation that many agencies and companies (e.g USGS on the North Slope, Japan National Oil Co. (JNOC), JAPEX, and Uchida working in the Mallik gas field in the Mackenzie delta) are working on tapping undersea clatherates, and some on subsoil methade hydrates, but no (commercial quality) successes have been published to my knowlege, so I saw no special reason to expect any advancements soon. However, my jaw about dropped off last week when (on CSPAN2) during an Alaska State Senate committee hearing on (selecting) gas pipeline routes the potential and expected development of methane hydrate harvesting was used a justification (by Mark Meyers, the director of the Oil and Gas division, State of Ak) for investing in a very large gas pipeline to Valdez, as well as a major gas liquifaction and shipping plant. It was suggested that, due to methane hydrates, the true gas produciton will be many many times larger than the Prudhoe Bay reserves. Methinks somebody knows something the public does not! (Not much out on the fringe side with *that* speculation, eh?) The main worries regarding a gas pipeline through Canada and into the Chicago area is that it will force the price of gas in that market area to drop below a profitable level! Combined with the Canadian (MacKenzie Field) gas, known to be at least 6 TCF, there will be too much gas delivered to the midwest USA. A gassification and shipping plant in Valdez permits marketing the gas to the west coast, and asia. I would not be surprised to see both built eventually. Congress allocated $49M in 2000 to study hydrate development in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. That money is about to run out, so Alaska is asking for $70M more. It is estimated that there are 100 TCF of hydrates under Prudhoe Bay alone - and they lie on top of the oil and gas production zones, but under the permafrost. If gas pressure is dropped in the production zone, and hot water injected into the hydrate zone, the hydrates will (hopefully) release gas into the production zone (from which they migrated in the first place) and it will be produced. The method of reducing pressure in production zones located below hydrates in order to get gas out of the hydrates (they spontaneously boil off methane at atmospheric pressure) has been in use for more than 40 years at the Messoyakha field in Russia. The Prudhoe bay production zones can provide 20 years worth of gas supplies, and with the production of the (overlying) extra 100 TCF maybe another 40 years worth. That is just the tip of the iceberg. There is probably over 30,000 TCF of gas hydrates onshore and offshore in Alaska alone. Similar amounts in Northern Canada would not be surprising. If we could use the hydrates to produce hydrogen gas for energy, and carbon fiber for building materials, we would have achieved something good for the environment I expect. The main problem is that clatherate boiloff may not be stopped in vulnerable areas, like the hydrate glacier off Vancouver, or shallow sub-permafrost areas. The only thing likely to save us is out of our control ... namely sudden changes in the ocean currents bringing on a glacial age. BTW, just like excessive wildfires and extreme storms are an early indicator of severe global warming, disappearing ships will be an early warning sign of major clathrate meltings. When the clathrate's crystaline structure breaks down small methane gas bubbles are released. As these bubbles rise they expand. The bouyancy of water filled with these bubbles drops. A ship moving across a major clatherate meltdown would be like a ship going over Niagra Falls. It would sink through the bubbles as if its weight suddenly increased several fold. There are not many ships in the extreme lattitudes, but, as the polar ice cap recedes, northern routes may become more common, and disappearing ships then will too. This clatherate bouyancy problem applies to submarines as well, in fact more so because they would be sucked into the bubble zone, but we are not as likely to hear about them. Regards, Horace Heffner
