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Japan Extracts Natural Gas From Frozen Methane Hydrate
ixarux writes "For the first time ever, a Japanese company has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off its central coast. The Nankai Trough gas field, located a little more than 30 miles offshore, could provide an alternative energy source for the island nation, reducing its dependence on foreign imports. 'A Japanese study estimated that at least 1.1tn cubic meters of methane hydrate exist in offshore deposits. This is the equivalent of more than a decade of Japan's gas consumption. Japan has few natural resources and the cost of importing fuel has increased after a backlash against nuclear power following the Fukushima nuclear disaster two years ago.'"
But I don't understand why Japan doesn't perfect Deep water cooling technology, using heat exchanges and thermocouples to generate energy. Or is the Inland Sea not deep enough?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The problem is transporting it. Transporting liquids (oil) is easy, you pump it through pipes to tanks. Transporting gas is slightly harder as you pump it in air-tight pipes to air-tight tanks.
Transporting room temperature solids is a moderately hard, you shovel it and truck it.
But frozen methane is the worst. It is solid when left alone, but turns to gas at room temperature. Worse, it is almost always at the bottom of the ocean.
If they solved this problem, great. But we don;t know they did that, because they were not very clear at all.
In my experience there is a simple explanation for that lack of information - very bad translation from a foreign language. Someone probably solved a rather minor technical issue about removing the frozen water, leaving the gas, but it probably did NOT solve the major 'do it underwater, at huge depths, at freezing cold temperatures, by robot' problem.
Instead of explaining that it was a minor technical victory, they left out all the details and claimed translation issues.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Not quite. This is the first offshore demonstration of extraction, but it's been carried out successfully onshore before.
Methane Hydrates and the Future of Natural Gas - MIT Energy.
To date, these permafrost-associated deposits are the only places
where production of gas from verifiable dissociation of gas hydrates has ever been documented.
Short-term (i.e., several days) production tests were carried out at the Mallik well in the
Mackenzie Delta area of Canada in 2002 and 2007 (Dallimore and Collett, 2005; Hancock et al.,
2005; Takahisa, 2005; Kurihara et al., 2008) and at the Mt. Elbert (Milne Point) site on the
Alaskan North Slope in 2008 (e.g., Hunter et al., 2011).
Offshore extraction of NG from hydrates for Japan will be a tough pill to swallow for people whose country was recently trashed by tsunamis, as hydrates are associated with prehistoric massive seabed slumping. Read more here: DOE Meeting Summary: Catastrophic Methane Hydrate Release
They are sure to awaken Godzilla.
This is madness! Madness, I tell you.
Everyone ignores the obvious downside of hydrates. The are stored in the sands at the bottom of the ocean so it means effectively strip mining huge tracks of the ocean to recover them. The ecosystem of the ocean is dependent on the ocean floor and reefs both of which would be devastated by this kind of exploitation. There's also the issue of the dirt thrown into the water column choking fish. The oceans are badly stressed as it is so dredging most of the remaining ocean could be what collapses what's left of the fisheries.
It specifically says they used the "Engineers used a depressurisation method that turns methane hydrate into methane gas."... google it... and find: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_hydrate
Offshore extraction of NG from hydrates for Japan will be a tough pill to swallow for people whose country was recently trashed by tsunamis, as hydrates are associated with prehistoric massive seabed slumping. Read more here: DOE Meeting Summary: Catastrophic Methane Hydrate Release
Also known as Clathrate gun
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
We seem to be having an unprecedented set of advances in extracting hydrocarbon based fuel sources other than conventional oil (and all that implies for the environment).
I support clean energy and would really like to see research expanded into fusion energy. However not a week goes by I don’t see someone preaching doom and gloom about Peak Oil. Even if these methane hydrate deposits don’t pan out (which actually they probably will) Oil Shale deposits have proven reserves of over 1 Trillion Barrels equivalent using current technology (and an insane potential with future advances) and the U.S. has the largest reserves worldwide. This is equivalent to approximately to all the known reserves for conventional oil and we have hardly begun to exploit it. Check out this link on Wikipedia for the numbers : Oil Shale Reserves.
Energy may become (slightly) more expensive in the future, there may temporary shocks from transition periods as we go to new hydrocarbon sources, but in the long run usable energy is there for the extraction in an economically viable fashion. If anything all this PEEK-OIL talk over inflates the value of energy. One has to wonder about agendas here. The only thing PEEK-OIL is doing is selling a lot of books for scare-mongers.
Perhaps we should go slow on utilizing these sources because of the environment, but even so I don’t see why prices are so high when every indicator seems to suggest there are massive new sources at hand. On the other hand if prices where low would we continue our slow march toward efficient use of what we have (LED replacement bulbs for instance and better insulated houses).
Letter To Iran
Obviously even multimillion dollar vaults get penetrated from time to time.
I don't think your comparison is valid. What is inside (say money or gold) is desirable enough somebody will risk life and limb break in. Breaking into a Nuclear reactor containment structure, while possible, is not going to contain much in the way of desirable things to take and the risks to life will be pretty high. How many folks would want to break into one, hit their lifetime radiation exposure limits in seconds, and attempt to steal what's inside? And what will they get? Miles of radio active copper wire? Radiation sources which are extremely easy to track along with the people carrying them? My point is that nobody really wants to break into a containment structure, while a bank vault has stuff they want.
So the real question is how often will the containment structure be compromised though accidental means? So far, out of thousands of years worth of reactor operating experience, we've only seen two contaminant structure failures. One killed a handful of people (between 100 and 200) and released quite a bit of radiation in Russia and eastern Europe and was caused by a seriously stupid operational error compounded by a reactor design that was nearly as stupid. The two stupids added up to one big stupid mess. The second containment breach event was caused by an extraordinary natural disaster which was outside of the design limits coupled with some seriously poor contingency plans, but hasn't killed anybody. All in all this doesn't seem too bad of a record to me.
It's safer per operating hour than riding in an automobile, or going on a commercial fight.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How is combusting methane better than combusting other hydrocarbons?
Apparently not what the gp meant, but combusting methane (CH4) is, in fact, better than ethane (C2H6), which is better than propane (C3H8), etc. As the chain gets longer, the ratio of C/H gets higher, resulting in more CO2 being released for the same amount of energy produced.
It explains that the Japanese found a way to send a pipeline down to the hydrates and depressurize them. This caused some of the released methane to travel up the pipeline they had dropped to the surface, where it could be captured as a gas.
Note it does not say how much of the gas is wasted/escapes into the ocean (which might have some very serious effects). On the other hand, they left most of the ocean pressurized (obviously) so it should hopefully re-sublimate back down to a methane hydrate.
It is actually a real breakthrough, rather than a mere translation problem. That said, a lot matters about efficiency. Merely getting a gallon of methane to the surface is not a huge deal if they have to burn 3/4 of a gallon to get it up (let alone transport it to someplace useful via a pressurized gas transport ship/pipeline).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Methane is less stable than CO2. Its lifetime in normal atmoshperic sunlight is about two decades. CO2 stays for thousands of years.
Drillers intentionally avoid it because it blows up wells and catches fire. Thats what happened three years ago for the Mocando Deep Horizon Well. (regular overpressured methane, not hydrate)
Scientists have a pretty good idea now how to detect it on a conventional seismic section, whether they want to avoid it or drill for it. Its seems to be in continental shelves over much of the world.
I am not sure there is a sentence of this post that is even remotely correct. Hydrates are not strip mined. With a drill ship, they drill the formation, then apply a vacuum to the drill string. The hydrate dissociates, leaving behind methane gas (which is sucked up the drill string), and a little fresh water. For every cm^3 of hydrate, you get ~164 cm^3 of gas at STP. A drill string, and bottom hole assemble of the research ship Chukyu is not very large, and will likely have no impact on the ocean floor, reefs, etc. There is very little "dirt" being thrown anywhere. Also, there is no dredging.
Opinions were like kittens, I was giving them away.
Huge difference between looking at estimated recoverable vs. estimated total quantity. Just because we know an energy source exists doesn't mean it will ever be worthwhile to spend the energy required to recover it. eg, Helium-3.
Shall beds are geographically huge, but note how they have so far only been drilled in the thickest portions and only the shallowest formations have been actively pursued (marcellus vs. utica). It takes a lot of energy to get a gas well to produce, sometimes more than it will ever be capable of producing.