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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."
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.
Clean-burning? Sure. But at $4.6 million a gallon, I'll stick with oil.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
a snowball's chance in hell of ever working.
There are tons and tons of the stuff at the bottom of the oceans. It's called methane clathrate and I'm sure it'd be easier to extract than ice.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Clean burning fuel has nothing to do with C02, but everything to do with nitrogen and sulfer compounds, often call NOx and SOx ("x" because the number of oxygen atoms varies depending on the species). Those two classes of compounds are responsible for smog, acid rain, and, in part, the ozone layer depletion. Given the choice between burning, say, coal, which produces an excess of NOx and SOx, and methane which produce only traces of same when properly combusted, I'll take the methane, thank-you-very-much.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
... just remember that if you mod something "flamebait" in the threads for this particular submission, they should automatically also be modded "insightful".
Do you even know what the hell you are talking about?
Of course it's renewable. All you gotta do is:
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This mixture forms all over the contenental shelves. And, as pointed out here, in Alaska as well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_hydrate.
s -selling-solar.html
There has been an ongoing effort, especially by the Navy, to figure out ways to exploit these deposits. The rapid release of the methane may be a hazard to drilling and shipping and is also considered a possible cause for rapid climate change in the past.
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Solar really is clean. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
"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....
Those three words come up in searches revealing some interesting, if not bizarre porn...
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.
In hydrocarbons burning the hydrogen provides most of the energy. Burning the carbon provides some, but the carbon is mainly useful for packing the hydrogen in a form more dense than H2 gas for convenient storage and handling.
As hydrocarbons go, CH4 has a higher ratio of hydrogen to carbon than any other molecule: Every bond on every carbon holds a hydrogen, none are "wasted" connecting to other carbons.
So if you're going to burn hydrocarbons for energy, methane releases the least CO2 for a given amount of energy produced.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
So now instead of burning fuel which causes global warming and in turn melts the ice, we'll have cleaner fuel which doesn't melt the ice, and all we have to do is melt the ice to get it!
I love it when a plan comes together.
No no no. You got it all wrong. You slowly warm the ice cubes in an alcohol solution. I'm going to begin some preliminary experimentation this evening with an eye towards large scale experiments this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes.
Cold steam would be sublime.
Sigh.
/. whose author or editor does not feel it necessary to include outright falsehoods.
It would be nice to see a science article linked on
Clathrates have been known about for a long time. Extracting them economically is an interesting interim move to extend the natural gas supply. Here's a nice summary of the potential and problems with this fossil-fuel energy source, in which the authors somehow manage to convey information and not wilfully and deliberately mislead their readers.
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