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.
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.