Posted on 04/26/2013 12:35:42 AM PDT by neverdem
New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.
As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill’s world. Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill’s outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal—a decision that continues to reverberate in the present. Burning a pound...
--snip--
The land sheds organic molecules into the water like a ditchdigger taking a shower. Sewage plants, fertilizer-rich farms, dandruffy swimmers—all make their contribution. Plankton and other minute sea beings flourish where the drift is heaviest, at the continental margins. When these creatures die, as all living things must, their bodies drizzle slowly to the seafloor, creating banks of sediment, marine reliquaries that can be many feet deep. Microorganisms feed upon the remains.
In a process familiar to anyone who has seen bubbles coming to the surface of a pond, the microbes emit methane gas as they eat and grow. This undersea methane bubbles up too, but it quickly encounters the extremely cold water in the pores of the sediment. Under the high pressure of these cold depths, water and methane react to each other: water molecules link into crystalline lattices that trap methane molecules. A cubic foot of these lattices can contain as much as 180 cubic feet of methane gas...
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Thanks for the link.
I have seen this spoken about going back to the nineties, it has always been spiked and ridiculed in the past.
Was it really Churchill that personally switched the Royal Navy from coal to oil?
Or was it simply inevitable after Rudolph Diesel invented his engine? Diesels were smaller, more powerful, safer, and more versatile than steam engines, so if England wanted to keep up with Germany, the choice was a natural one.
Gov. Patrick refuses to open welfare books on Tsarnaevs
Gun control fight spills over to federal research
Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
The engines that replaced the coal engines weren’t diesel engines. They were oil fired steam turbines.
This energy is too expensive.
Today, it costs about $50 per million BTUs to extract natural gas from undersea methane hydrate.
U.S. natural gas costs $4.2 per million BTUs.
Oil replaced coal in steamships long before significant numbers of large ships were powered by Diesel engines. Even supertankers used steam because they had plenty of space for boiler rooms.
“Today” is the key word in your post.
Natural gas was significantly more expensive just a few years ago, before large amounts of fracked natural gas became available. The price was admittedly still much less than the $50/MMBTU that you quote for extracting methane clathrate, but no one has had a real need to seriously go after them and develop efficient equipment and techniques.
Once that need arises, the energy is there.
And further, for very large ships, like I don’t think you’ll ever replace the steam turbine. I think you get into scaling problems with transmissions with gas turbines beyond a certain level.
So we’ve just gone from using coal, to oil, to nuclear energy, to run boilers to make steam to drive steam turbines to drive screws.
If you ever get a chance to go see the guts of one of the several U.S. retired WWII battleships or aircraft carriers that are on display around the country, looking at the boiler rooms is fun. Well, it is for me.
;-P
Oil comes from the earth. Carbon + Pressure + Heat result in different substances: coal, oil, diamonds, etc. Who said this process is going to stop? Al Gore? This process is not going to stop any more than politicians are going to control the activities of the sun. Is this the main reason for dumbing-down our schools? So the populace will be more vulnerable to hoaxes?
Yes but now shale gas is to cheap to drilling.
So, natural gas production in the U.S. has not grown since 2011.
In 2012, Chesapeake, the second-largest producer of natural gas, lost $940 million.
At the same time, natural gas consumption is skyrocketing.
In 2012, the U.S.used 25.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas used servus 22.9 trillion cubic feet in 2009.
This is why Royal Dutch Shell expects US natural gas prices to double by 2015.
I'm a "propulsion guy" too - have seen the Midway (San Diego) and the Lexngton (Corpus Christie) - boiler rooms a sight to behold.
Hoover Dam turbines (pre- 911) was fun to see, too.
CHK had made some really bad land deals and the former CEO Aubrey (forget his last name) always had his weinie in the soup making sweet deals for himself. Range Resources, albeit not the largest player is doing well.
I live in the Marcellus region. Drilling has slowed due to low gas prices and also because the pipelines and compressor stations can’t keep up with the drilling. Marcellus is mostly a dry gas. Utica is a wet gas that has a lot of other valuable substances in it. The drilling in the Utica area (eastern Ohio, and West Virginia is going strong. CNX and Shell being 2 of the major players.
Back in college my Pet/Nat gas Engineering buddies would laugh when someone called oil a fossil fuel. They said back then (1978) that the world would never run out of oil, the earth makes it faster than we could ever use it.
As long as we have oceans we’ll have oil.
You’re not allowed to see the innards at Hoover Dam?
I’ll know we have returned to sanity when the sign says: “Hourly Tours for Non-Muslims.”
Shale formations are not cheap to drill and it is why the amount of drilling rigs going after Natural Gas has fallen so much.
The chart is a little dated, we have been below 400 rigs for a month or so.
North America Rotary Rig Count (Jan 2000 - Current)
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MTgwODUyfENoaWxkSUQ9LTF8VHlwZT0z&t=1
See tab: US Oil & Gas Split
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.