Well this interested me a little, so I thought I’d share..
being a firm believer in peak oil, my first thought was that my car doesn’t run on natural gas.. saying a natural gas discovery is going to solve the oil problem is kinda like a shortage in gold being solved by discovering more zinc.. they serve different purposes..
If oil does deplete to the point that it’s no longer feasible, then everything we have that runs on oil would have to be made to run on natural gas.. meaning that NG is no longer responsible for 22% of our energy usage, it would be more like 62%...
The line that stuck out for me was, “If only one percent of the methane hydrate resource could be made technically and economically recoverable”.
Hopefully a lot more than 1% would be realistic, as that’s not enough to do much of anything.. 1% of 200,000 trillion cubic feet would only be 2000 trillion. If used as a replacement for oil, a rate of 62 trillion cubic feet per year would only be 32 years worth.. hardly an end all solution.. it wouldn’t be long till we were dependent on foreign methane hydrates..
> my car doesn’t run on natural gas.. saying a natural gas discovery is going to solve the oil problem is kinda like a shortage in gold being solved by discovering more zinc
Natural gas can be catalytically combined with oxygen to form methanol (quite easily, I might add). Methanol can be used directly in ‘flex-fuel’ cars, or it can be catalytically converted directly into gasoline.
http://yarchive.net/chem/gasoline_make.html
It’s not quite as simple as cracking crude oil into useful fuel fractions, but it’s not too difficult either.