Gas Goes Solid

Roland Piquepaille writes "This innovation from Japanese researchers can potentially revolutionize the energy distribution sector. Instead of transporting liquid gas, they changed gas into a solid material which is easier, safer and cheaper to distribute. Technology Review has the story. "Rather than extracting methane from hydrates, they want to turn methane into hydrates -- essentially, transforming the colorless and odorless gas into small pellets that can be easily stored, transported, and eventually turned back into natural gas. A few months ago Mitsui, in partnership with Osaka University, opened a demonstration plant near Tokyo to promote the concept and show that it works." Check this column for an analysis."

Comments

One problem

[Zanek]

There is one fundamental problem with this great idea. That is, how do they go about converting
the millions of cars in the world to be able to use this !

Things to remember

[wowbagger]

1) Hydrates are not stable at room temperature and pressure - you still have to keep them cold (-10 C). Granted, -10C is better than -100C, but you will still have to have a refrigeration unit or a pressurized tank.

2) When you break the hydrate down, you have methane and water. You have to do something with the water - dump it on the ground, feed it into the engine to be vaporized, something.

3) While hydrates may store more methane than storing the methane as a gas, I don't think hydrates store more methane per unit volume than storing the methane as a liquid.

4) You are storing methane and water - you will have more mass per unit methane than storing just methane.

Those things said, this could be a good thing, in that anything that allows better storage and transport of methane makes it a more viable fuel source.

It's great they're beginning to research hydrates

[stuph]

There are literally thousands of tons of methane hydrates all bundled up nicely on the ocean floor next to small cracks and fissures that leak methane. Now that people are actually beginning to do real research into transporting them and extracting methane from the hydrates, perhaps it will be possible to mine these methane fields, where there is enough energy to last hundreds of years

net energy loss

[layyze]

Assuming that the laws of thermodynamics still exist on this planet, I am curious if there would be some kind of net energy loss in this process. Factoring transportation, refrigeration, and changes in states it seems like a lot of energy is being used up in this process. Just a thought.
Brazil had (has?) similar issues in using ethanol as a fuel. The machinery used to harvest and convert the sugar into ethanol used more fuel than was produced.

Re:Methane hydrates

[SimJockey]

OK, I did a Google search and couldn't come up with anything on White Crude. Are you talking about GTL or gas-to-liquids technology? Reacting C1's to C5+ molecules to make them stable at room temperatures for shipping etc.