Posted on 05/25/2017 11:12:37 AM PDT by Hojczyk
China is talking up its achievement of mining flammable ice for the first time from underneath the South China Sea.
Estimates of the South China Sea’s methane hydrate potential now range as high as 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas equivalent. That’s sufficient to satisfy China’s entire equivalent oil consumption for 50 years.
The world’s resources of flammable ice — in which gas is stored in cages of water molecules — are vast. Gas hydrates are estimated to hold more carbon than all the world’s other fossil fuels combined, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
And it’s densely packed: one cubic foot of flammable ice holds 164 cubic feet of regular natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“If there is a real breakthrough,” they wrote, “it could be as significant as the shale revolution in the United States. Under such a bull case scenario, we’d expect a significant increase in offshore exploration and production activities.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thegwpf.com ...
Absolutely a product that should be mined. I’m not in the energy sector, but why the heck isn’t this something being aggressively pursued?
Melt the ice, the seas will rise and we’ll all die!
It will have to be vaporized, dehydrated, cooled, compressed and liquefied and routed through pipelines to destination points. One hell of an expenditure. We have methane hydrates in the Pacific and Atlantic waters that will, sooner or later, be mined and processed to produce LNG.
Clean burning LNG is the fuel of the future.
Aggghhh! Carbon! Pollution! We're all gonna DIE!
Cheap and near endless supply of energy to power industry and even everyday residential living.
Methane in some form or another will be powering our world well into the next two or three centuries, and the putzing around with solar and wind energy for terrestrial power uses will be long abandoned, as too expensive for wide application.
Anywhere a gas line can reach, is assured of being supplied reliable and adequate supplies of energy for heat, electricity and transportation. Spark ignition engines run on CNG or propane with little modification, while Diesels still have to have SOME Diesel fuel to assure the compression-ignition cycle operates efficiently, but supplemental gaseous fuel may be introduced to the air charging system to reduce the actual consumption of the Diesel fuel, while reducing the nitric oxides, soot particulate, and unburned fuel. And of course, there are no sulfur compounds in the CNG or propane. So low-sulfur or non-sulfur Diesel fuel can eliminate that problem altogether.
Depends upon production costs... it may have enormous potential for the future, but pursuing near-term production would depend upon current energy markets and prices compared to costs of production. Natural gas prices are pretty low right now, so it may be difficult to make this profitable.
Wellll,, they did invent fireworks.
What could possibly go wrong with harvesting flammable ice 8-?
Had quite a bit to do with trying to exploit hydrates when I was in the energy business. Yes, there is enormous potential but the simple truth is that exploiting this resources is very, very difficult. Several knowledgeable, experienced groups have had a crack at it and nothing commercial has come along yet. I’ll believe the Chinese can do it when I see it.
If true, bye bye Saudi Arabia. It was nice (not!) knowing you.
From the numbers I’ve seen China has huge amounts of frackable shale and in the long run their oil and gas supplies look good. But with fracking and better transport in the future I think the whole world will have as much natural gas as it needs. In the US electricity from natural gas is now cheaper than electricity from nukes. No one would have ever predicted that happening in the last century.
Natural gas costs a lot more in China & any other place, which imports LNG. It costs a lot to liquefy the gas — more than the raw feed stock costs now. Then there’s the shipping costs.
Unless natural gas is being transported by ship (or is being used to fuel a ship); it doesn’t need to be liquefied. Compressed natural gas can be shipped economically by pipeline.
OTOH, depending on how fast this technology develops, The N. American (and Russian) natural gas industries could suffer losses, if supply gluts ensue.
The oilcos have been poking at this for years but so far it is not yet economically feasible. China can do it at higher expense because it is a government project. They can’t sell it profitably until methods improve sufficiently to bring down the cost of production. It would put “sustainable” energy out of the picture except as a leftist control enthusiasm. There is so much of that stuff that running out in the long foreseeable future is not a consideration.
Perfect response, thank you. “sustainable” isn’t a reality either, but buys votes. We wasted so much money chasing that pipe dream, we could have used toward mining hydrates take those dreams off the table for a hundred generations.
Hot puppies! I’m gonna run my Yugo on ice farts.
Fair dinkum, and why all my buddies are back home from the Bakken.
I was a week away from buying my friend a welding truck to send his unemployed ass out there. I bought the truck, sat on it for a week, and poof, the market died. Need anything welded? Anyhoo, it’s ready to go next boom cycle.
China’s secret breakthrough in methane entails, spy on American industry, copy their ideas, take credit.
Ingenious.
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