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Burning Ice Drilled from Alaska's Slope
bagboy writes to tell us that as sources of renewable energy are being sought, BP has announced a new method of extracting natural gas from ice underneath Alaska's North Slope drilling fields. "Scientists with the federal Energy Department paid $4.6 million to drill for the hot ice just below the surface of the Milne Point well, which is situated northwest of Prudhoe Bay. [...] Now, scientists from around the world are waiting for pieces of this strange ice to conduct their own tests and determine whether Alaska's frozen grounds contain untapped, clean-burning energy."
This is certainly not renewable.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Well, "clean" and "environmentally friendly" aren't always the same... Methane burns cleanly, pretty much as cleanly as combustion can possibly get. "Clean" here is implying "without partial combustion byproducts that result from burning gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, wood, or pretty much any other organic substance". So in the sense of what we traditionally think of as pollutants, the noxious fumes that come from your car's tail pipe, it's clean. Is it going to reduce greenhouse gasses? Well, not so much.
So it turns out that this particular find is not a solution for global warming. Yet if we are going to continue burning organic materials for energy, and we assuredly are for the next decade at least, then I'd rather it be a "clean" burning hydrocarbon.
The enemies of Democracy are
"Clean" used to mean "Won't poison us".
I suspect that the major corporations are playing both sides of the greenhouse gas war. After all, with everyone oh so focused on CO2, nobody will notice a little dioxin leak here or a mercury leak there.
We even had a letter to the editor at our paper the other day talking about a whole whopping pound of dioxin once leaked out of a plant in italy or something, and it killed off a bunch of stuff but just gave people open lesions, so it can't possibly be so bad that the government has to force poor, poor companies to spend money keeping it in containers instead of just dumping it out in the back yard. A few months back another person wrote to the editor claiming that the cost of poisoning no more than one person in a million with cancerous substances was forcing his company out of business.
If global warming turns out to not happen, you can bet companies are going to be using the hype and subsequent failure in order to justify releasing all sorts of chemicals that are known to actually cause harm to people, and the suckers who felt burned (or who were saying "told you so all along") will be more than happy to agree.
"the few remaining bit of ice left on the planet"
are you for real? there is litterally billions of tons of ice on this planet. i'm going to just assume you've never even been outside your own little burb on this one.
i think i know whats going on here, your one of these people who needs to feel self rightgeous about something, but because the world you live in is really quite good, you make up this imaginary enemy to attack. your own confusion is eveident in the fact you advertise an anti war demonstation in a thread about drilling for methane trapped in ice
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Coming on the heals of this article Fuel Tanks Made of Corncob Waste, this could be quite serendipitous.
They use lots of Natural Gas for taxis in China. I asked a driver about it, he claimed it to be about half the cost per mile compared to gasoline. Seeing how the tank dominated the trunk of these taxis, I suspect it could rupture in a rear end collision. I doubt these particular taxis would be permitted on American roads, but perhaps the new "Corncob Waste" tanks will make them smaller, safer, and economical for American use.
While methane releases CO2, it still decreases our reliance on foreign oil sources. I think de-funding terrorism is higher on most Americans to-do lists than stopping Global Warming. You can argue whether these priorities are out of wack, but I'm sure this is the way most will see it.
I personally think we Should drill for oil in Alaska as well as pursuing these other cleaner sources of energy. Failing to do so will only result in more reliance on Coal and even worse ecological damage as we rip up the Earth for Tar Sand and Oil Shale. Oil is a passing fad. We will have fusion someday, but for now we have little choice but to use what is at hand. This isn't to say conservation is not good also, just that some conservation measures fail the unintended consequences test. The DOE has an over 20 billion dollar year budget, the world barely can scrape together 15 billion over a 10 or 15 year time span for ITER. If we through 5 billion a year at it, I bet we'd have commercial fusion up and running in under 10.
Letter To Iran
No. Only releasing CO2 that has been locked out of the ecosystem for an extended period of time affects climate change. All the rest is already factored into the system, and simple cycles around between plants and animals.
That's the standard line from the pro-oil PR companies, yes. But it's absurd. The CO2 already in the ecosystem, as I pointed out above, is not contributing to climate change. It's in balance already. The old 'cows farting' line is quite warn out, and completely discredited. Only *new* sources of CO2, such as those locked up in fossil fuels, and which therefore add substantially to the atmosphere when burned, contribute to climate change.
This is a key point that people unsure on climate change are being fooled by. It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the relationship between plants, animals and CO2.
When you take energy that has been stored for millions of years (such as oil or methane in the ground) and burn it, you are releasing its energy (which has been out of circulation for a while) as heat into the atmosphere. Do some calculations and see that since we started burning oil, we've unleashed a disturbing amount of energy into the atmosphere - enough to cause some global warming on its own without even considering the greenhouse effect.
It's like printing an enormous amount of new currency. Sure, you can spend it, but there are consequences to releasing that much new currency into the economy.
Burning it is better than letting the methane itself become a greehouse gas. IIRC, methane about 130x times worse than CO2 in terms of greenhouse gas potential. A lot of this stuff is naturally just bubbling out of the ocean floor. Our cattle are making some too, but I don't know if it's significant compared to other sources.
Easy.
Stop paying taxes to the Bush admin.
~
It's not a greenhouse gas if it's trapped in ice, though.
Although yes, to rule it out entirely simply because methane produces CO2 is silly. Switching to non-carbon-producing energy sources is a great idea if it can be done, but switching from oil to methane isn't terrible in the meantime.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Except that CH4 is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Burning methane, especially in a system that cools the exhaust to capture liquid water, is actually better than releasing it into the atmosphere as is. "When averaged over 100 years each kg of CH4 warms the Earth 23 times as much as the same mass of CO2" - wikipedia.
Given the rate that polar ice is already melting, the sooner this technology is used commercially, the better.
I don't therefore I'm not.