China Successfully Mines Gas From Methane Hydrate In Production Run (oilprice.com)

hackingbear writes from a report via OilPrice.com: In a world's first, China has successfully extracted gas from gas hydrates in production run in the northern part of the South China Sea. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), global estimates vary, but the energy content of methane in hydrates, also known as "fire ice" or "flammable ice," is "immense, possibly exceeding the combined energy content of all other known fossil fuels." But no methane production other than small-scale field experiments has been documented so far. The China Geographical Survey said that it managed to collect samples from the Shenhu area in the South China Sea in a test that started last Wednesday. Every day some 16,000 cubic meters (565,000 cubic feet) of gas, almost all of which was methane, were extracted from the test field, exceeding goals for production mining. This is expected to help cut down China's coal-induced pollution greatly and reduce reliance on politically sensitive petroleum imports controlled by the US. "The production of gas hydrate will play a significant role in upgrading China's energy mixture and securing its energy security," Minister of Land and Resources Jiang Daming said on Thursday.

Comments

Re:Great.. Methane..

[Zocalo]

From what I've read on the Methane (CH4) vs. CO2, it's not at all clear cut. CH4 is indeed a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2 - figures of 20-30x the heat trapping potential are often mentioned - but lingers in the atmosphere for a much shorter span of time than CO2 as natural processes tend to remove it within a decade or so. An additional problem is that those natural processes might be in the process of being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of CH4 being introduced into the atmosphere, both from natural sources (about a third of the total) and human sources like transportation and intensive livestock farming.

Getting back to the question at hand, whether it's better for the environment to burn the CH4 vs. something else, you'd need to take into account exactly what is getting released into the atmosphere for a given amount of energy output. There are already technologies in place to limit CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants, so if it's possible to do something similar for burning CH4, then there's no reason why it wouldn't be a much cleaner source of power than coal, GWh for GWh.