Saturday, December 29, 2007

methane hydrate

Perhaps I'm a neophobe, but to me this doesn't sound like a resource we should be rushing to exploit.

A couple of notable excerpts:
Billions of tons of methane hydrate, frozen chunks of chemical-laced water buried in sediment some 3,000 feet under the Pacific Ocean floor, may help Japan win energy independence from the Middle East and Indonesia. Japanese engineers have found enough "flammable ice'' to meet its gas use demands for 14 years.
Impressive. But then:
"Methane hydrate was a key cause of the global warming that led to one of the largest extinctions in the earth's history,'' says Ryo Matsumoto, a University of Tokyo scientist who has studied frozen gas since 1987. "By making the best use of our wisdom, knowledge and technology, we should be able to utilize this wisely as a new energy.''
Hmm. These two sentences don't really go together so well, do they? He goes on:
"A mass release of methane into the sea and the atmosphere is a risk for global warming,'' he says. "Massive landslides at the ocean floor must be avoided when drilling at the Nankai Trough.''
It seems the best way to visualize this material is as a huge, iced fart. And Japan isn't the only place that has its fart reserve. They're in continental shelves all over the world. A couple of maps [1, 2] are available.

Methane hydrate is the gas produced from decay of dead things that have settled in the oceans. That's what we've come to. Graverobbing down 800 meters to slake the thirst for energy. For a resource we can subsist on for a few decades at best.

I could be wrong - maybe the farts can be extracted safely and odorlessly; maybe a big, sustained input to the global energy pool can be used economically and geopolitically to redirect energy policy in a clean, clever way. Maybe. It clearly has market attention now - capitalism does love a cheap meal.

But ... another fossil fuel? Maybe this methane hydrate bridge loan is not where we should be pinning our hopes just now.