The Arctic Is Leaking Methane

registerShift and other readers sent in news that the Arctic Ocean seabed is leaking methane. "...climate experts familiar with the new research reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane's role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat. ... [One scientist] estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.) By some estimates, global methane emissions total about 500 teragrams a year. ...about 40 percent is natural, including the decomposition of organic materials in wetlands and frozen wetlands like permafrost."

Comments

Fuel?

[hackwrench]

So can it be capped and used for fuel?

Re:Fuel?

[carlhaagen]

Wouldn't it just be easier to collect the staggering amounts of methane byproduct from all our cattle and other livestock? Surely the methane resources in these "establishments" are far more manageable than those of an arctic plain.

Re:Fuel?

[Mindcontrolled]

In most cases, probably not. The methane is seeping out at low local concentrations over a vast area - there is no huge concentrated deposit like it is the case with oil or natural gas. Instead it is dissolved at low concentrations in the soil. Pure, concentrated methane hydrate deposits exist and might be useable for fuel extraction, though. Those are usually deeper in the oceans, where the hydrate is stabilized by water pressure. Getting the stuff to the surface without prematurely releasing the methane due to the pressure reduction is non-trivial, though. I suppose oil and natural gas are too cheap to make harvesting such methane hydrate deposits economically viable at the moment.

Re:Fuel?

[BobMcD]

See my post above, but also, Re #2:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/26/methane_digester/

The cost of the setup is here:

The biggest hurdle is cost. This on-farm power plant, called a manure digester, is only the third in the state, and it has a half a million dollar price tag. Federal, state and local grants paid for much of it, but the farmer paid the remaining $100,000.

The savings seem less clear, though he does expect to drive his car for free, power the process for free, and earn $400/week from pumping power back into the grid. Without knowing his costs, it is hard to say for sure how long it would take him to reclaim even his own $100,000.

We can guess though, from this site:

In South Dakota, for example, electricity alone represents 30 cents per 100 pounds of milk.

and

The 200 cows on Jerry Jennisson's central Minnesota dairy farm make 1,100 gallons of milk every day.

Google holds the weight of milk at '4.5 lbs/gallon'... So a little rough math puts the dairy farm's operation at 4950 pounds and $14.85 per day.

Total revenue, from what we know, generated by the digester is something in the area of ($5,420.25 + $20,800) $26,220.25/year. He'd get his money back out in four years, or so, and the total break-even is twenty years. None of this accounts for the other economic factors. There are likely additional positives and negatives to the formula, but at the end of the day it actually does earn money.

Also, this is first-generation tech. Efficiency will undoubtedly go up, increasing revenue and lowering costs. There were only three at the time of the writing, which means they were not being mass-produced, but custom built.

For clarity

[HungryHobo]

7 teragrams = 7,000,000 metric tons.

Far easier to think about if you work in units people are used to.

To compare to something in human terms:

The British Emerald is the largest LNG carrier I can find and can carry somewhere in the region of 77500 metric tons of gas (155,000 cubic meters with LNG having a density of about 0.5 kg/L).

So this is something like approximate to the largest natural gas tanker in the world releasing it's entire load into the air about 90 times over.

any corrections to figures welcome.

Re:Nothing to see here....

[PakProtector]

Parent is insightful, +5.

We have, as a nation, in the name of Corporate Greed and the Maximization of Profit, destroyed our manufacturing sector, which was the world's greatest after WW2. We have ceased to create real Wealth, and now we produce only imaginary Wealth. Not everyone can be a Doctor or a Lawyer or an Engineer. We need actual jobs that actually produce things.

Our entire system is based on a redistribution of wealth; we take it from the many and concentrate it into the hands of the few.

My submission was scooped! :)

[wisebabo]

But I'm happy about it because I think it is important. Anyway since I spent a while putting my submission together, here it is for your (hopeful) enjoyment:

Will LIFE almost end AGAIN? Another Great Dying?

I've said it before (http://slashdot.org/submission/1066423/Another-Permian-extinction-on-the-way?art_pos=62, http://slashdot.org/submission/1056203/Global-Warming-Tipping-Point?art_pos=71) and I'll say it again: there may be a chance that we may be facing another Permian level extinction event. What is that you say? It was the greatest extinction event in earth's history (hence "The Great Dying") causing up to 96% of all marine organisms to go extinct and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates. Remember, these are entire SPECIES that went extinct, individual population losses were obviously higher. The cause? Well according to Wikipedia: "only one sufficiently powerful cause has been proposed for the global 10 reduction in the 13C/12C ratio: the release of methane from methane clathrates;[7]"

So, as you can see, I keep saying this because the stakes are so high.

Well now there are reports (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=10010948) that the methane clathrates off of Eastern Siberia are releasing 8 million tons of methane a year. While currently "negligible" compared to global emissions of about 440 million tons: "The release of just a 'small fraction of the methane held in (the) East Siberian Arctic Shelf sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming,'" This WILL become more likely because: "If atmospheric temperatures rise, the hydrate stability zone will shift upward, leaving in its stead a layer of methane gas that has been freed from the hydrate cages. Pressure in that new layer of free gas would build, forcing the gas to shoot up." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090902133637.htm. Of course what's driving this is the quick rise in temperatures in the Arctic/Antarctic, temperatures there are rising twice as fast as the global average (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/14/arctic-permafrost-methane). So even if we manage to keep the temperature rise BEFORE counting in the additional methane release to a very optimistic 2 celsius (3.6 degrees for Americans) it will be twice that for the arctic regions. Remember also that these articles are talking about just a small part of the arctic methane clathrate reserve (which is itself just a tiny part of the global reserve in all the deep sea sediments) and that it is coming out of out of the sea bed in other places too. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090902133637.htm).

If the temperature rises cause enough methane to come out to cause the temperature to rise even more we could be in for a very bad greenhouse effect. Methane is 20x more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2 and there are 500-2500 Gigatons of the stuff on the ocean floor compared to just 700 Gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere. So if just 5% of the stuff comes out, we've doubled the heat retained in this manner by the atmosphere!

Now I probably lost the climate-denialists/creationists/young-earthian/Republicans a while ago but to those of you still reading please consider that this is an EXISTENTIAL threat, that is it threatens our (humankind's) very existance. Maybe if temperatures soar into the mid-one hundreds, people will still be able to walk outside/in the winter/in Antarctica and exist in air-conditioned caves elsewhere but I think you'll agree we will have made our own hell on earth. So even if the chance of a semi-runaway greenhouse effect is very small we should really REALLY be careful. (To see the effect of a full runaway greenhouse effect, just visit Venus, hot enough to melt lead!).

Sure prediction, especially about the future, is hard. But the vast majority of climate scientists think we are headed for a cliff in the fog, fast. They may dis

Re:My submission was scooped! :)

[radtea]

Why do people think climate scientists are any different,

Because they work in a field that is extremely messy and fraught with uncertainty and yet promote the results of their unphysical computational models as being virtually certain, and they lead their arguments with fearmongering language about the risk of dire consequences rather than the science.

If anyone believes that climate models are an adequate basis for public policy, then they also necessarily believe we ought to immediately implement global free trade, because economic models are of far higher quality than climate models, and the underlying processes are far better understood, and all economic models show that global free trade would be of vast economic benefit, to the extent of saving millions of human lives per year.

So give that you are assuming that climate models are a sufficient basis for public policy, am I correct in assuming you are also absolutely in favour of global free trade? Can you point to any impassioned articles you have written on this subject, and the millions of lives that are lost each year as a result of not adopting this policy? You are clearly deeply concerned with things that will better humanity's future, so surely you must have written such things.

If not, why not?