Any talk of peak fossil fuels petered out with the development of shale gas
in recent years. Any talk of peak shale gas (not that there has been) must
now give way to the development of hydrate gas. The writer of the following
has a doctorate in science and is, in my opinion, a lot more cautious than
he need be about the possibility that the Japanese will succeed in
developing a cheap technology. I'm a bog standard graduate in chemistry
but have been interested in clathrated methane (its more technical name)
for many years. For an industry that's has developed the brilliant
technology needed for shale gas I've little doubt that it will succeed in
the case of hydrate gas.
Keith
(The Times 15 March 2013)
Burnable Ice Will Set The Energy World On Fire
Matt Ridley
Move over shale gas, here comes methane hydrate (perhaps). On Tuesday the
Japanese Governments drilling ship Chikyu started flaring off gas from a
hole drilled into a solid deposit of methane and ice, 300m beneath the
seabed under 1,000m of water, 30 miles off the Japanese coast.
The real significance of this gas flare probably lies decades in the
future, though the Japanese are talking about commercial production by
2018. The technology for getting fuel out of hydrated methane, also known
as clathrate, is in its infancy. After many attempts to turn this fire
ice into gas by heating it proved uneconomic, the technology used this
week depressurising the stuff was first tested five years ago in
northern Canada. It looks much more promising.
Methane hydrate is found all around the world beneath the seabed near
continental margins as well as in the Arctic under land. Any combination of
low temperature and high pressure causes methane and water to crystallise
together in a sort of molecular lattice. Nobody knows exactly how much
there is, but probably more than all the coal and oil put together, let
alone other gas.
The proof that this can be extracted should finally bury the stubborn myth
that the world will run out of fossil fuels in any meaningful sense in the
next few centuries, let alone decades. In 1866 William Stanley Jevons
persuaded Gladstone that coal would soon run out. In 1922 a United States
Presidential Commission said Already the output of gas has begun to wane.
Production of oil cannot long maintain its present rate. In 1956 M. King
Hubbert of Shell forecast that American gas production would peak in 1970.
In 1977 Jimmy Carter said that oil production would start to decline in
six or eight years. Whoops.
The key will be cost. However, Japan currently pays more than five times as
much for natural gas as America, so even high-cost gas will be welcome
there. The American economy, drunk on cheap shale gas, will not rush to
develop hydrate. (Unlike oil, there is no world price of gas because of the
expense of liquefying it for transport by ship.) The shale gas revolution
is effectively already putting a ceiling on the price of energy. America
has lost its appetite for gas imports, which now go to Europe and Asia
instead, but is gaining an appetite for exporting it. Domestically,
Americas cheap gas has caused electricity generators to switch from coal
to gas, and buses and trucks to start switching from oil to gas. Even if
hydrate proves stubbornly expensive and its generally wise not to bet
against Japanese ingenuity it will put a roof over this price ceiling.
Hydrate and shale are not the only new sources of gas. Thanks to newly
perfected drilling technology, new deep-sea gas fields are coming online
off Brazil and Africa and in the eastern Mediterranean. The days when gas
production was concentrated in a few charming places such as Iran, Russia,
Venezuela and Qatar are gone.
Indeed, one of the best ways to love the new gas-fired future is to list
those who detest it. As recounted in a new documentary, FrackNation,
Vladimir Putin, at a dinner with journalists in 2011, suddenly became
agitated about the supposed devastation of Pennsylvania by the shale gas
industry. His new-found concern for the Appalachian countryside might just
have something to do with the threat that shale gas poses to Gazproms
stranglehold on European markets.
For those still concerned about climate change, this is also good news. In
atomic terms, methane is one fifth carbon and four fifths hydrogen. Not
even the most die-hard environmentalist can find anything bad to say about
burnt hydrogen, or water. Given that combined-cycle gas turbines run at
higher energy- conversion efficiency than coal-fired steam turbines, the
carbon dioxide output from gas-fired electricity is well below half that of
coal-fired.
Thanks to shale gas, Americas carbon dioxide emissions in energy
production have plummeted by nearly 20 per cent in five years without
political targets or policies, while Europes have hardly changed, despite
expensive schemes to subsidise the producers of renewable energy and
penalise fossil fuels. (Apart from hydro, which has little capacity for
expansion, and biomass, which is environmentally worse than fossil fuels,
renewable energy remains an irrelevance in the energy debate. Even now,
Britain still gets less than 1 per cent of its total energy from wind.)
Moreover, there is a possibility that methane hydrate could be almost
carbon neutral. The University of Bergen, in Norway, has developed a
process that pumps carbon dioxide into the hydrate deposits, where it
replaces the methane, turning methane hydrate into carbon dioxide hydrate.
The results from a field trial in Alaska are expected any day. If this
process can be scaled up, and if the carbon dioxide from burning the
methane could be captured economically (big ifs), in future Japan could run
on fossil fuels but generate almost no carbon emissions.
As it takes market share from oil and coal, gas will dominate the worlds
energy supply for much of this century before perhaps giving way to
something cheaper perhaps nuclear energy based probably on thorium rather
than uranium, or solar power.
Not only has cheap gas given the United States falling carbon dioxide
emissions, it has also delivered it a huge competitive advantage in
manufacturing. Firms are re-shoring their operations from Europe and even
China, as the low cost of American gas outbids the low cost of Chinese
labour. To be competitive, countries must have either cheap labour or cheap
energy. The European elites strange determination to have neither is the
root cause of its current stagnation
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