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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."
Because hydrates are still a mysterious substance, there are many scientific and engineering obstacles that could make the process cost prohibitive.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
Don't rabbits and deer already produce small pellets that emit methane?
Cows produce large methane generating chips too.
Certainly helps with the energy company PR problems, who can argue with a fluffy little cute bunny? Will Greenpeace dare break out the holy hand grenade?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
In Japan, gas is solid.
... ?
In the USA, gas is liquid (i.e. petrol).
In Soviet Russia, gas is
OLPC Australia
Tried to produce gas, came out solid.
Shit happens.
Whoa...the ice is burning.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Miles per Gram?
Miles per Pound?
Miles per Pellet?
Miles per Block?
Heck with this we might as well switch to metric.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I assume that a pellet stove could be used with the resulting pellets.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Assuming that all the hurdles around the process can be overcome, and it turns out to be finacialy sound, this may very well be the start of a revelution as far as energy distribution goes. Something needing just -10C to distrebute... heck, I could store a pile outside in the winter and just carry 'natural gas' inside in a bucket. Come summer, whatever remains there was would just evaporate away (I assume) safely. Methane - which is the main component of natural gas - is a quite efficient fuel for a properly designed internal combustonengine, or you could feed it to a fuelcell.
I missed a few details however... just how do you go from solifed gas and back to gaseous gas? Is it just a matter of heating them above -10C, or? Can anyone offer any inisght on this? Because if it's a realtively easy process, I can easily imagine these pellets beeing used for energydelivery in cars, homes, cabins, laptops (well, maybe not for a few years) etc etc ad nasaum.
...and then there is the 'other uses' this stuff can have... If you built a bomshell much like a thermos, you could just fill it up with pellets, add a bustercharge and get yourself a nice FAE-bomb...
Oh, gotta qoute this bit of the article (emphasis mine);
Norwegian petroleum engineers first proposed the idea after comparing the transport economics of liquid natural gas to natural gas hydrates, knowing that hydrates could store large amounts of natural gas in a small space.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Gas Goes Solid
Japanese researchers may have found the secret to exploiting the world's untapped natural gas reserves.
By David Wolman
April 11, 2003
Nearly 95 percent of the known gas fields in the world are too small to justify the costs required pipe the gas to a plant, turn it into a liquid, and then transport it on specially equipped tankers.
But a handful of researchers have an idea that could make these fields worth mining: rather than figure out cheaper ways to transport this cleaner-burning energy source from point A to point B as a liquid, why not change natural gas into a solid substance that's easier and cheaper to transport?
Japanese researchers Hajime Kanda and Yasuhara Nakajima at Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding in Tokyo think they've found a solution with the aid of hydrates, solid crystals in which natural gas--composed chiefly of methane--is caged inside of water molecules.
For decades, researchers have been looking for ways to gather these crystals from their deep-ocean deposits and reap what they expect could be a natural gas harvest. Kanda and Nakajima are taking an opposite approach. 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. If the Mitsui's process proves feasible and economical, many untapped natural gas deposits could become vital energy sources.
Changing natural gas into a hydrate form for cheaper transport gained attention in the early 1990s. Norwegian petroleum engineers first proposed the idea after comparing the transport economics of liquid natural gas to natural gas hydrates, knowing that hydrates could store large amounts of natural gas in a small space. "More than 180 standard cubic feet of gas can be stored in one cubic foot of hydrate," says Rudy Rogers, professor of chemical engineering at Mississippi State University, and an authority on industrial use of gas hydrates.
Another major advantage: "transporting natural gas as hydrates can be done at lower temperature and pressure than liquid natural gas, and the risk of ignition in transport is much lower," explains Hugh Guthrie, who studies natural gas at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, WV. Much of the high cost of liquid natural gas comes from temperature and pressure demands on piping, shipping, and storage facilities.
Producing the hydrates requires mixing natural gas with water in a continuously stirred tank reactor. When gas is piped into the water from the bottom, hydrates form on the surface of the gas bubbles. Removing the residual water leaves behind a residue of hydrate powder. Kanda and Nakajima envision a hydrate-pellet production plant close to gas fields in Southeast Asia. From there, a pellet carrier would transport the hydrate load to plants where the pellets would be turned back into gas and piped to market.
The company's demonstration plant produces as much as 600 kilograms of hydrates per day, moving the methane through all the necessary phases: hydrate formation, storage, pelletizing, and "controlled dissociation," or separation of the gas and water. Whereas a liquid natural gas facility requires temperatures of -162 C, Mitsui's plant operates at -10 C, which means huge savings in cooling costs. Kanda says the project, which is co-sponsored by the government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, demonstrates that hydrates can be a successful vector for gas transport.
Mitsui's only significant competition in gas hydrate technology comes from another Japanese company, Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi is pursuing its own gas-to-solid technology based on a hydrate-oil slurry, a process whose main drawback is that i
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Heat shock, it's called. When the temperature of your freezer goes up by even a fraction of a degree (and it need not go anywhere near as high as 0 degrees celsius), some of the ice melts. When the temperature drops again, it re-freezes, but in a slightly different location. That's why ice cream (especially the really expensive stuff, that doesn't have many or any stabilizers like guar gum in it) will develop that coating of ice crystals after it sits in the freezer a while. The ice is migrating from inside the ice cream to the surface.
Now, what I have GOT to wonder is this...what effect might this have on ice pellets that contain lots and lots of tiny bubbles of methane??
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It certainly adds new meaning to the phrase "It gives me gas." I can just picture future parents of a teen on his/her first night out driving the family vehicle...
"Dear, did you remember to give our son gas?"
"Yes, I did. His trunk is full of it..."
Etc.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Ugh. First off, they are talking about natural gas, not gasoline.
Secondly, they arent expecting the consumer to recieve these pellets, the pellets are just a intermediary to ship and store the gas easier before it gets to the customer. This should have been EXETREMELY obvious since it specifically states that the pellets are harder to ignite then regular gas, you shouldnt have even had to RTFA for this one.
And thirdly, you wouldnt convert all the cars on the road to a new fuel source, you would just produce new cars, and eventually phase the current ones out.
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
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
Methane hydrates are not particularly high-energy-density fuels- wouldn't be suitable for automotives, for example-but the bigger a store the easier it is to keep cold (lower surface area to volume ratio) so I guess they could actually be useful as a way of storing large amounts of gas economically and safely, the role they are basically playing on the seabed right now.
Basically, I just don't get the Japanese argument. Is it really going to be cheaper to transport several ordinary refrigerated trucks of methane hydrate than one very cold truck of liquid methane? It looks as if the technology might be more of a way to stockpile large reserves of gas. As electricity generation in many parts of the world is increasingly gas-fired using turbine generators, perhaps this is a way to protect fuel reserves and generator capacity better from terrorists.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
You can thank Slashdot for another useless article summary and title. The process is actually talking about Natural Gas, not Gasoline. The primary goal of this is not to make "fuel pellets" for cars (although that would be cool), rather it's to find an alternative method of transporting Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). LNG tankers have to maintain a very cold environment (-162 C) and high-pressure environment, as do the processing facilities. This new method only requires facilities at -10 C (or 14 F, slightly cooler than your kitchen freezer) so it would be a huge savings in costs. It would also eliminate the need for huge pipelines, since most transportation from the field to the distribution area could be done in pellet form.
Yay ambiguous article headlines.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
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.
-dr. layyze f. tooth PhD
Beans, the ultimate solid gas pellet
If I was at work today, I'd fire up the LNG simulations to see exactly how many scf's of natural gas will fit in a cubic foot of LNG. I'm willing to bet it's more than 180. So you'd have to transport much more hydrate than LNG for an equivalent amount of natural gas.
Also annoying that they mention nothing about pressure, as the fun way to get hydrates that I know about is to flash a high pressure stream of natural gas with a bit of water across a valve to lower pressure. Hydrates form and plug up the valve. Not a good thing, But the point is that pressure=compression costs. Nobody ever seems to give lifecycle energy costs for these new & improved technologies. And yes, I realize they are using a tank reactor, but I bet there are still some decent pressures involved to get reasonable yields.
LNG has always been borderline on whether it makes economic sense. Places like Trinidad and Qatar are into it because they have such huge natural gas supplies in relation to their oil reserves that they can build huge plants and get some economy of scale. Customers are places like Japan (hence this bit of research) and the U.S. believe it or not. Latest numbers I heard are that LNG is competative with pipeline natural gas at about $4/MMSCF, depending on how far you have to ship it. With the strong prices of the last couple of years, the pace of projects is accelerating.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
The BBC also have a story including a picture from Geomar showing "burning ice" resulting in water dripping in some brave soles hands. As the Beeb's website says "Don't try this at home!"
wot no sig
Is the next phase of development the transformation of gas into a cube-like dynamic solid called "Energon"?...
The United States Minerals Management Service (MMS) has done an extensive amount of investigation and research on this topic. Since they regulate federal offshore waters, this has been a topic of interest to them. You can find out what is going on in hydrate research at MMS from these links: http://www.mms.gov/eppd/sciences/esp/hydrates/rese arch.htm
http://www.mms.gov/tarprojects/
Of course Japan would be pushing this technology because they have the largest know reserve of hydrates off their coast. In the U.S. there is a large reserve off the coast of South Carolina. Unfortunately this is in a development restricted area so research opportunities have been slow developing.
Hopefully we will see more new stories about this type of research in the future.
had a good show about these methane type pockets on the bottom of the ocean. I think they were trying to explain bermuda triangle stuff. anyway, They said the pressure and coldness down on the bottom of the ocean made the methane solid. For some reason, if some of this solid methane became a gas, it'd release soo many bubbles of methane that it if there was a ship above it, the ship would lose bouyancy and sink. They showed a test done on a model ship in a testing pool, and the ship sank almost immediately.
anyway, thats one source of solid methane... Don't know how usable it'd be, being on the ocean floor, but if they could find a way to mine it, it could be a sweet deal.
It's common to store hydrogen in a tank of metal hydride chips. The tank doesn't have to be as strong, and cyrogenic temperatures aren't required. It's also far safer; if damaged, the hydrogen comes out slowly as the hydrides outgas, so at worst you get a fire, not an explosion.
Look for how many hazardous chemical spills we had in the US by trucking or train in the last couple of years...
When you use overland transportation, the variables increase -- thousands of potential collisions, more human error capable (as there are now thousands of drivers instead of a few pipeline controllers), weather variables, road conditions, etc.,etc.
In Soviet Russia, gas liquifies YOU! ;)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I'd say piping gas is safer than trucking it, unless your pipelines are very exposed to trucks ;).
As for car vs plane safety- depends on whether you are measuring per distance, trip, travel time etc.
http://www.teemings.com/issue07/safety.html
Tried to produce gas, came out solid.
Your cubicle is probably not the most popular I can gather
Table-ized A.I.
Hydrates are quite interesting.
... and guess what conditions predominate in undersea pipelines?
Right out of College about 13 years ago I joined one of those huge Oil Companies and the main thing I did there for 2 years was study gas hydrates. The reason we studied them was in order to *prevent* their formation which is the opposite of what this article talks about. The problem with hydrates in the oil business is that under high pressure and low temperature they form
When oil comes from the formation, it is almost always mixed with water and some varying amount of gas or other hydrate forming HCs. Everything is fine up the wellbore and near the wellhead, but not too far away from the wellhead the fluid starts getting cold and these solid particles form. They can clog a pipeline if you don't take countermeasures. One is to run a device called a "pig" through the pipeline to clean them out. Another is to install insulation, heated lines, or inject lots of chemicals like MeOH to suppress the hydrates. But all of these things start increasing the production cost and/or decreasing capacity.
So our research looked into creating chemicals that you could inject in very small volumes near the wellhead to inhibit the formation of hydrates.
Anyway, all this hydrate study did make people think about the application of hydrates in the transport of natural gas (NG). I think it's a very interesting idea. Currently to get NG from a remote place to market, you need lots of big expensive gas turbines driving massive refrigeration equipment to create Liquified NG (LNG). Then you need these huge, wild looking LNG tankers. Then you need special port facilities to handle the super-cold LNG. The up front capex is so massive (think 10 billion plus for many potential projects) that no one just pays that upfront hoping the customers will show up. No. You get agreements on paper stretching out 30 years with customers and only THEN do you give the green light to the project.
Hydrates certainly wouldn't need near the compressor/turbine expense of LNG development, and there might be a sweet spot in terms of pressurization and temperature you might strike. However the rest of the economics I'm not too sure about. If most of the cost of a project is the tankers and you need a lot more of them for Hydrate, then you might be better off with LNG. The other huge thing in LNG's favor is that we know it works and can calculate a cost.
One interesting idea I saw floated once was the creation of hydrate subs. Huge deepsea vessels that would be able to stay cold and high pressure just by virtue of being well below the sea surface where those conditions are natural. Now unlike a typical sub, these guys would never surface and so would not need thick walls to handle pressure differences inside and out.
Imagine one of these things scooping up hydrate from the ocean floor and carting it off to a disassociation plant on the seabed (preferably in a subsea canyon as closs to the coast as possible) that evaporated the hydrate gas into a regular gas pipeline.
dave
ODP has been doing research into the area of gas hydrates for a while now. Not only can natural gas be turned into hydrate, but there are vast amounts of gas hydrate "stable" on the sea floor. Gas hydrates are also stable in certains areas of permafrost in the arctic. On an environmental note, it is not known exactly how hydrate. influences global climate change. Methane is 10 times the the global warmer that CO2 is. A large hydrate landslide off the northern coast of norway coincides nicely with an warm period. As sea level falls during an ice age, pressure on hydrates decreases, destabalizing them, and releasing methane into the atmosphere. This could serve as a natural buffer against ice ages. On an interesting side note, Gas hydrates have been proposed as the cause of the dissappearances in the bermuda. triangle. The theory is that a field of gas hydrates destabalizes right below a ship releasing a plume of methane gas. The water density will decrease. The ship sinks.
Opinions were like kittens, I was giving them away.
Here I sit all broken hearted
tried to shit and only farted.
Then one day I took a chance,
tried to fart and shit my pants.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.