Posted on 03/24/2007 10:01:50 PM PDT by thackney
Taiwan has found off its coast huge deposits of frozen natural gas, known as the "ice that burns" and billed as the energy source of the future, a newspaper said yesterday.
Taiwanese and Japanese researchers succeeded in extracting samples of methane hydrate from the ocean floor off Taiwan's southwest coast and will publish their report in May, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) reported.
The team began its exploration two years ago, after US and Japanese scientists suspected methane hydrate deposits in the region through monitoring by satellite and scientific equipment.
Relying on a deep-sea remote-controlled research ship, the team recently extracted crystallized methane hydrate from a depth of 1,100m and recorded how it began to melt at 500m depth and vaporize at 400m depth.
Methane hydrate, in its original form, looks like whitish-yellow ice or ice cream. But at room temperature, it vaporizes and can be ignited.
"One unit of methane hydrate contains 170 units of natural gas. So the ocean floor is like a gas cylinder holding compressed methane hydrate in crystal form," Professor Yang Tsan-yao (·¨Àé³ó) from the National Taiwan University and one of the team members was quoted as saying.
The team estimates that the southwest coast holds about 600 billion cubic metres of methane hydrate, enough to meet the country's energy needs for 60 years.
Several countries, including Japan, the US and Canada, have begun to explore methane hydrate -- also called the "greenhouse energy."
(4) Methane is found in many locations where a biogenic origin is improbable or where biological deposits seem inadequate: in great ocean rifts in the absence of any substantial sediments; in fissures in igneous and metamorphic rocks, even at great depth; in active volcanic regions, even where there is a minimum of sediments; and there are massive amounts of methane hydrates (methane-water ice combinations) in permafrost and ocean deposits, where it is doubtful that an adequate quantity and distribution of biological source material is present.
The huge gas deposits in the form of methane hydrates in the oceans may not have an adequate explanation in terms of the plant debris of the ocean mud. There is often little organic mud and its gaseous products would not have migrated downwards. Yet it has been said by the Russian investigators (Makogan, 1988) that, so far as they could see, in every location on the ocean floor and in the permafrost of the North where the temperature-pressure situation would make methane hydrates stable, they are found. As the deeper ocean regions are being investigated for hydrates, the inadequacy of a biological source material for them may become even more obvious, since the biological deposits there tend to be much smaller than in the continental shelf regions that have been the principal targets so far.
--The Origin of Methane (and Oil) in the Crust of the Earth
This isn't anything new. It's been known for about 100 years that there are huge deposits of frozen Methane hydrate off the shores of most every continent. Oil is just easier and cheaper to extract.
There never was any worry by the oil industry of "peak oil" and a big energy crisis. when nateral gas is exausted, They'll begin thawing out those frozen methane deposits.
Still, like ANY fuel, renewable or otherwize, with theexception of pure hydrogen, when burned they produce "evil" co2
Huge energy reserves: Yet another reason for China to push for "reunification" with Taiwan...
Algore is going to be really pissed about this development.
BTTT
And hydrogen doesn't exist as a fuel, but requires consuming more power than it produces in order to make the fuel.
Worldwide, estimates of the natural gas potential of methane hydrate approach 400 million trillion cubic feet -- a staggering figure compared to the 5,500 trillion cubic feet that make up the world's currently proven gas reserves.
Methane Hydrate -
The Gas Resource of the Future
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/oilgas/hydrates/index.html
Ruh roh, Taiwan has just sealed their fate so far as 'reunification' is concerned.
Well Taipei, it's been nice knowin' ya.
How to 'harvest' it will be the big problem.
Methane Hydrate deposits equal in total energy value more than double that of all the worlds oil, natual gas and coal deposits combined.
The largest single deposit known, named “Hydrate Ridge,” lies off Oregon’s coast.
I guess Oregon will someday in the future be the hub of all natural gas pipelines.
I had not heard of "Hydrate Ridge” off Oregon’s coast. I know Alaska has very large deposits of Methane Hydrates.
How do you mine the stuff 1,100 meters below the surface?
If I could answer that question with an economical method, I would become the richest man in the world.
I am sure that it is technically feasible.
Algore actually incorporated sea-floor methane hydrates into the scare-pitch he gave to congress this week. He has talked to "one" scientist who suggests that global warming "could possibly" cause these formations to break free from the ocean floor, vaporize, and introduce enormous quantities of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. To him its just one more way to frighten the kiddies. No mention of how hot the oceans would have to get, or how probable that would be.
Sure it does. Nature produces hydrogen constantly, but the problem is that it doesn't pool up, and in quanities we could use. Production of useable amounts takes some energy, yes, the amount of which depends on the process.
You could make a lot of hydrogen quickly and with no energy cost at all, but of course the aluminum and processing of the chemical takes energy to begin with. But if you are thrifty and have lots of energy, you can pick up beer cans in the ditch, buy lots of draino and make enough hydrogen to meet your needs, if you can manage to use it without blowing yourself or your house up.
Should we ever figure out how to make more than it takes energy to produce, the enegy crisis would be over, forever. Or at least until all the water vapor we produce and release into the atmosphere brings upon us another great ice age and we all die... :o)
What ever the case, you can be sure that if mankind figures out how to make cheap energy, and have fun and live well, the anti- humanists out there will find a way to spoil it by ringing the doom and gloom bells.
Did he really do that? What an idiot, LoL!
And yet media doesn't ridicule him for that kind of stupidity.
That just goes to show how pathetic media is, and/or how absolutely stupid the flunkies who call themselvess "journalists" are.
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