Undersea Deposits of Frozen Methane Found

geoswan writes "The CBC is running a story about large deposits of Frozen methane off the coast of Vancouver Island . The deposits may be 850 meters deep. The story doesn't say how the methane came to be a solid. Pressure? The story doesn't address what technology could be used to mine these deposits, if the decision is made to develop these resources. The CBC showed pictures taken of the methane hydrate. Sure enough, it looked like a big snowbank. It is an environmentally sensitive area. So, how about it, should it be exploited?"

Comments

Note frozen methane

[stevelinton]

It's not actually frozen methane as such. The freezing point of methane is much too cold for that. It's a clathrate essentially a form of ice with methane molecules trapped among the water molecules. It's stable at temperatures just above the normal freezing point of water, and high pressures. If the pressure is released (for example by bringing it to the surface) it decomposes into water and methane gas.

Re:How it formed

[Khalid]

Yes this a major concern in case of global warming, trapped methane can buble to the surface and cause a major disater, and even further enhance greenhouse effect. There is a lot of this methane all around the ocean.

Re:Who owns it?

[Shab264]

It doesn't matter who owns it right now...because with current mining and salvage technology, that deposit of hydrates is a liability and nothing more. Right now, there's no way of safely and efficiently getting all that gas from the bottom of the ocean. If you went down there and hit a big chunk of that stuff with a pick axe, you'd risk setting off a chain reaction that could lead to a catastrophic explosion (no kidding...I wrote a research paper on methane hydrates for my degree) that could spell disaster for the whole world...(methane is about 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2)...or at the very least kill everyone at the site either by suffocation or fireball. Even if you gently try to scoop the stuff up and bring it to the surface, it will decompose on the way up and either suffocate everyone at the site or ignite and burn everyone to death. There's been several times already where an oil derrick was engulfed in flames because the hydrates around the site became unstable, bubbled to the surface and met up with a happy spark.

The point of all this informative rant: hydrates hold the world's most ginourmous amount of natural gas--but if you mess with it with current technology, you can release it all at once and really screw the earth up.

Re:North Sea Boat ...

[arivanov]

Besides the article it has also been broadcasted in BBC series on global warming. Few notes: 1. It is not frozen - it is gaz-hidrate. Which is natural under the pressure+temperature conditions in question. It is though that there is a humongous quantity of methane tied in gas-hidrate on the ocean floor especially where rivers bring out organic matter into the ocean. 2. If you look into the global warming models - half of them do not account for this methane and methane has higher greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide. The ones that take into account this methane in general predict hell on earth. Basically once the ocean has warmed up enough the methane starts to come out which speeds up global warming and more methane comes out. Classic chain reaction. 3. There is some geological evidence that these methane eruption global warming events have happened in the past. It was presented on the BBC program in question. 4. Forgot how the show was called but it is possible that you may find some of the data on bbc web site (not news, the proper www.bbc.co.uk).

They wouldn't stall either

[Spamalamadingdong]

Methane has a molecular weight of 16; air has a molecular weight of about 29. If you were going at more than about 1.4 times stall speed (and most aircraft do cruise quite a bit faster than that), the wing would not stall. Even if it did, all the pilot would have to do is point the nose down a bit to gain some airspeed and the plane would be flying again.

I don't watch the Discovery Channel, but if they didn't have anyone on staff with enough knowledge to rule out such obviously impossible failure modes you should not be using them as a source of information (at least not on a more trusted level than the National Enquirer).

Unfortunately, a pilot in the midst of a huge bubble of methane might not be able to manage that, plus the engine quitting or backfiring (and if the methane was mixed with enough air to be flammable, BOOM!), and even if neither of those things happened the pilot would be breathing toxic amounts of methane and might not be able to control the aircraft.