With energy demands sky-rocketing in recent years, people are turning to more unconventional resources to help bolster conventional energy. Gas hydrates are one such unconventional resource. For those that don't know, gas hydrates are molecules of methane (CH4) bound in a "cage" of ice molecules. In essence, gas hydrates are solid gas. They are typically located in low temperature, high pressure regions, such as permafrost and the ocean floor. A few areas of interest for gas hydrates include: the Nankai Trough off the southeast coast of Japan, the North Slope of Alaska within the permafrost, the Pacific Ocean adjacent to the Cascadia Range of Canada, and the Gulf of Mexico.
Gas hydrates have become such a hot topic for use as a potential energy resource because they may offer up to several hundreds of thousands of trillion cubic feet in-place on the ocean floor alone. If this resource can be accessed and economically exploited, the world's thirst for energy would be satisfied for up to a couple of hundred years.
Until recently, however, gas hydrates have been seen as hazardous to more conventional oil and gas production. Due to changing temperature and pressures, they can clog pipelines and and cause explosions. At depth, gas hydrates that occupy only one cubic foot of space expand to 160-180 cubic feet. Additionally, they may play a role in tsunami formation when they become displaced due to earthquakes. This claim is still being tested, however. Gas hydrates are also likely to be a natural sink for methane, a compound known to influence global warming and climate change. If these deposits were disturbed on a massive scale, the global effect would be greater than 3,000 times the current amount of methane in the atmosphere.
The controversy is relatively straightforward: should we exploit these natural high-energy resources or leave them alone until we understand them better? Gas hydrates have the potential to be the next greatest source of energy for the world, or a global disaster in the making.
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I wonder if they measured atmospheric methane concentrations after the recent earthquake in Japan? They might have been able to test the whole earthquakes-releasing-gas-hydrate-pockets-theory. If a big quake like that isn't enough to pop those bubbles, I doubt we're gonna have a problem with them.
ReplyDeleteThat is a good question...I am not sure if their was any methane measurements made after the earthquake but it would be interesting to see if it changed at all. The earthquake may not have been in a deep enough area were gas hydrates are present.
ReplyDeleteUm...put like that, it seems like we should wait until we know more. But we've never really done that. Some have argued this has been key to our progress, others that it will lead to our demise. So, a debate it is.
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