Slashdot Mirror
China To Tap Combustible Ice As New Energy Source
lilbridge writes "Huge reserves of "combustible ice" — frozen methane and water — have been discovered in the tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China. Estimates show that there is enough combustible ice to provide 90 years worth of energy for China. Burning the combustible ice may be a far better alternative than letting it just melt, releasing tons of methane into the air."
I'd tap that.
Actually, this is both interesting and apparently fits into the "suddenOutbreakOfCommonSense" category. If you ask me, it seems perfectly logical to not only stop it floating up into the air as it would do otherwise, but to also get power out of it.
Seems too good to be true. I wonder what the downside is.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I like to admire the Asian tundra on Google Earth, and think about what a paradise it must be for mosquito predators, birds and such. I guess now we will be trying to discover how much environmental degradation is required to crash that eco-system. Too bad.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I wonder what the downside is.
One downside is that they will be stealing it from occupied Tibet.
90 Years worth of energy for the nation with the largest population in the world seems like sufficient cause for China to claim that Tibet is part of China and always has been etc, despite the fact that it has been independant for much of its history (although its also been occupied by one power or another for much of the rest of that history of course).
If Tibet had its independence this would be a terrific resource for the country to take advantage of in modernizing itself. As it stands I am sure it will be used for Chinese benefit and not Tibetan.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Correct me if I'm wrong but If the CO2 is liberated twenty times faster (or more) than the methane would be liberated naturally, then there is not a win-win...
It occupies an area of around 1,000 by 2,500 kilometers, and has an average elevation of over 4,500 meters.
The plateau is a high-altitude arid steppe interspersed with mountain ranges and large brackish lakes. Annual precipitation ranges from 100 mm to 300 mm and falls mainly as hailstorms. The southern and eastern edges of the steppe have grasslands which can sustainably support populations of nomadic herdsmen, although frost occurs for six months of the year. Permafrost occurs over extensive parts of the plateau. Proceeding to the north and northwest, the plateau becomes progressively higher, colder and drier, until reaching the remote Changthang region in the northwestern part of the plateau. Here the average altitude exceeds 5,000 meters (16,500 feet) and year-round temperatures average -4C, dipping to -40C in winter. As a result of this extremely inhospitable environment, the Changthang region (together with the adjoining Kekexili region) is the least populated region in Asia, and the third least populated area in the world after Antarctica and northern Greenland.
Wow, a Class L planet.
That reminds me of a bit from BtVS: Spike "You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not going around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world isn't people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story."
As far as TFA, anything that will help China deal with the incredible smog they generate that is so bad it can be detected in California is a good thing. IIRC China has a whole lot of smog cranking coal fired power plants, and hopefully this will allow them to shut some of those down. Meanwhile we could use the tech GE has developed and start using the energy from chicken manure which is mostly methane IIRC, to generate power while providing heat to the chicken coops.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's trapped in ice and not in the atmosphere at all. As long as it was trapped it contributed nothing to any theoretical greenhouse effect. (Ok so I think Al Gore is exaggerating things drastically so he can make a absolutely huge fortune on energy futures. I'm a little cynical.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
No, you don't understand Chinese thinking.
The combustible ice is merely a practical concern. As such, it's basically unimportant compared to the extremely vital matter of Never Losing Face Ever, which is probably the single most important core value in far-eastern culture. Not losing face is more important than life itself and *far* more important than minor things like a few petawatt-hours of energy.
You have to understand, if Tibet hadn't always been part of China, that would imply that the "liberation" of Tibet in the mid-twentieth century was an aggressive action, not a peaceful one, and that the PROC government acted in bad faith (especially as regards the Seventeen Point thing). Admitting such a thing would be an unfathomable loss of face and an unconscionable disgrace to every Chinese person. It would be better for the entire nation to commit ritual suicide than to allow such a thing to be said.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> So when was the concentration of methane in the atmosphere so high it caused this?
There may be other ways it could have happened.
Just for example, if an insulative ice cap formed overtop a mass of biomatter (say, a bog) that was otherwise still warm enough to decompose, possibly with some water in between, you could end up with a mixture of methane and water ice forming below the ice cap as the whole thing cooled. A few thousand years later, melt off the top layer of ice, and you've got combustible ice exposed to the surface.
There may be other possible formation scenarios as well.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"and will have a population of about 1.5 billion"
I thought I remember reading projections somewhere, which indicate that China's population is soon supposed to begin a pretty rapid decline, due to several decades of 'birth control' measures imposed by the government? Contributing even further to that, I had heard that there is a large imbalance in the population ratio between males and females, because, since parents were limited to one child, many of them chose to abort girls and 'try again' until they had a boy? Because of the predominance of males, there are fewer females to become pregnant and birth the next generation, further contributing to long-term population decline?
Shouldn't those things be starting to have an effect 20 years from now?
You inadvertantly described the flaw with fuel cell cars.
You have water, and you crack it to make hydrogen, which makes the cars roll down the road. Sounds great doesn't it? But where does the energy come to crack the water? ----- Often the response is "just use solar" and that's fine, but if we have solar why not simply use the electricity directly in the car or house or other device? There's no need to add the additional water/hydrogen step.
Alternatively we could just use the same liquid fuel as we have now. Use solar electricity for everything else, but keep cars as they are now. We've got 10,000 years worth of coal laying around that could be liquefied into diesel fuel, and pumped into one of those new Volkswagen commuter cars at 250 MPG. These cars are so clean the pollutant can't be measured.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
By the gods how I hate this stupid meme. People have more than two kids because they like to fuck and don't have/use birth control. No one says, "You know, we're going to need an extra farmhand in 15 years, maybe you'd better take out your diaphragm."
How many kids did your great-grandparents have? Do you think they wanted the 'extras' because they were going to need extra workers in a decade or two, or maybe so that the kids would support them in their old age? Oh, that's right, we're talking about BROWN people, they don't love having children around the house as much as we do.
Think for 30 seconds. Even better, get to know someone who grew up in the Third World.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
It looks like this article is referring to the Tibetan Plateau, more steppe than tundra, and even more sensitive to environmental damage. This stuff does not recover quickly from disturbance. And every bug IS sacred if you think your grandchildren might want to watch birds that migrate. The oceans are quite vast, yet it is distinctly possible we may have already permanently altered the entire system by polluting breeding areas and depleting or extirpating key species.
I've not yet been to Alaska, but I got out of the car once in Minnesota to get a better look at a moose. I then managed to fight my way back to the car through the solid masses of mosquitoes before being fatally exsanguinated. I pity anyone who takes a job at this nightmare.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.