Fire and Ice

Neter writes: "There is a story over at the CBC about wanting to solve the worlds long term energy problems with ICE."

Comments

That's not what it says

[babbage]

There is a story over at the CBC about wanting to solve the worlds long term energy problems with ICE

Yeah, well that's the headline, but if you read more than the first paragraph you realize that that's not at all what they're saying. They're trying to get at methane (natural gas) that happens to be locked in ice, but that (duh!) isn't itelf ice.

It may be methane in a frozen state, but that is hardly the conventional meaning of the term "ice". This is a bit like saying $oil_company is trying to meet energy needs with dirt, because they're digging an oil rig that happenes to bore though dirt.

The fact is, these methane deposits seems to exist along a lot of the world's continental shelves, but we haven't yet found a way to bring them to the surface. So these people happen to be going after one of these deposits that happens to be sitting in some arctic ice. Nifty, but not news, and certainly not news in the way this was written up.

Nothin' says editorial integrity like a Slashdot writeup....

RE: That's not what it says

[jayteedee]

But a hydrate is (in this case) methane which happens to be surrounded by water molecules so it is indeed 'ice' surrounding the methane. You might consider it contaminated ice. Plus the article that was linked actually used ice in the title, so it isn't exactly a /. problem. This of course doesn't mean that FUD shouldn't be applied to /. titles in general. :)

But to keep this on topic. If microbes are responsible for the formation of the methane, why isn't there a method to get the methane directly from the microbes work? There is plenty of organic waste available. That would seem to be the bigger story since melting the ice to get to the methane you have to pass through that nasty latent heat of fusion barrier. Or drag the ice to warmer climates.

There are other issues involved

[Spamalamadingdong]

If microbes are responsible for the formation of the methane, why isn't there a method to get the methane directly from the microbes work? There is plenty of organic waste available.

There are several such methods. HOWEVER:

1. Digesting organic waste (such as municipal garbage or crop stalks) only yields a relatively small amount of fuel.
2. The amount of carbon currently inventoried in arctic permafrost and continental shelf sediments is thousands (millions?) of times as much as the annual turnover on farms.
3. We wouldn't want to harvest the biomass of the arctic to digest it directly, because we'd disturb the ecosystem rather badly. Grabbing some methane that's only going to escape into the atmosphere anyway is much less of a disturbance.
4. Methane is a greenhouse gas some 200 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, so harvesting and burning this methane for fuel may be better for the environment than letting it escape freely.
5. We may have no choice about this, because warming already on the way is likely to free up a lot of methane currently trapped in hydrates; we can either let it give the warming trend an enormous push, or use this methane ourselves (and perhaps replace lots of coal and oil with it).

That's just a few things off the top of my head.

... melting the ice to get to the methane you have to pass through that nasty latent heat of fusion barrier. Or drag the ice to warmer climates.

Or just use warm surface water (continental-shelf hydrates) or heat pipes from the surface during the summer (arctic hydrates) to do it essentially for free.
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