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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.
The CO2 emission per KW produced by burning coal is nearly twice as high as from methane. Not a final solution but still better than coal.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Since you are cut-and-paste reposting what you already posted, I will cut-and-post what I already replied:
The difficulty here is that you are mixing up stuff that's correct, and stuff that isn't.
For the longest time earth was flooded with CO2 18 times higher than we have today,
That part is true. The Earth has had more carbon dioxide in the past,
and it was colder.
This part is not true. In general, when there's more carbon dioxide it's warmer, and when there's less it's colder.
We had more CO2 in THE FUCKING ICE AGE.
First, to be pedantic, let me remind you that we are in an ice age right now: there are permanent ice caps on the planet that don't disappear in the summers. The detailed place we are in the cycle is that we are in an "interglacial" period, but overall, yes, we're still in an ice age.
It's quite well accepted that the glaciation cycle is driven by Milankovitch variations, the pattern of solar insolation (short for "incident solar radiation," by the way) across the northern and southern hemisphere. Carbon dioxide and water vapor, however-- the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere-- are the amplifiers that turn the relatively small insolation changes into global temperature changes.
As the cycle of increase of glacial and interglacial periods go, the record is very clear: glacier advance correlate with reduced carbon dioxide, and glacier retreat trends with increased carbon dioxide. So, no, your statement is backwards-- if by "in the fucking ice age" you mean "during the ice covered periods of the current cycle", then, no, we had less CO2 in the atmosphere in the fucking ice age.
The graph you link, with a minimum increment on the time axis of 100 million years, doesn't show the ice age cycle (with time periods three orders of magnitude shorter than that). Here's a graph of temperature and carbon dioxide over the last four glaciation cycles:
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/images/VostokIceCore.html">http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/images/VostokIceCore.html
The rest of your post seems to have equivalent random mixing up of facts. You write:
I don't know why you idiots just don't do your own research but keep repeating nonsense just because someone else said so.
But that seems to be exactly what you are doing-- posting a scrapbook of random unrelated stuff without, as far as I can tell, making any attempt to understand it. Here are some links:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-thawed-the-last-ice-age/
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_2.shtml