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| Frozen Methane: Environmental Catastrophe or Perfect Solution? | ||||||
| (Tuesday, 09 March 2010) Written by greeniac11447 | ||||||
| It's not just any ice. It's ice that combusts into flames! It's also China's newest green energy solution to reducing carbon emissions. It's called frozen natural gas, methane ice, or "combustible ice". Natural gas in its normal form is considered the most environmentally friendly fossil fuel. China's reserves of it also happen to be able to power China for the next 90 years. As part of a program to transition to cleaner energy sources, China has announced plans to ramp up its use of this wonderful "combustible ice". Why? One part frozen natural gas has the same amount of energy as 164 parts non-frozen natural gas by volume. Also, other than possibly methane, it emits almost nothing in air pollution. However, therein lies a potential problem. Methane emissions are widely known to be 20 times as potent as carbon emissions in contributing to global warming. Although burning the combustible ice isn't that bad, mining it from the ground might be. Experts warn that mining the gas improperly might suddenly release massive amounts of bubbling methane into the atmosphere. On the other hand, not extracting it might also mean massive methane release. Naturally, when the temperature shifts or pressure changes, methane has been known to so suddenly surface in giant bubbles that it has actually sunken ships. In the Arctic, this is already happening on a vast and dangerous scale. Melting permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf itself releases methane stored in the soil as it decomposes. Also, as the permafrost thaws, the frozen methane in the sea begins to get exposed to sunlight and gets released as gas into the atmosphere. Scientists in this area have detected over half of waters have methane emissions at a rate 8 times higher than normal seawater, and the trend only seems to be increasing. So maybe China has it right. Why not extract and burn frozen methane now, so it can't get into the atmosphere later? We would just have to do it very, very carefully. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-03/06/c_13200033.htm http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=2063290 http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2010/2010-03-08-03.html
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