Alaska ice tested as possible new energy source
17 November Fox News
A half mile below the ground at Prudhoe Bay, above the vast oil field
that helped trigger construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline, a drill
rig has tapped what might one day be the next big energy source.
The U.S. Department of Energy and industry partners over two winters
drilled into a reservoir of methane hydrate, which looks like ice but
burns like a candle if a match warms its molecules.
There is little need now for methane, the main ingredient of natural
gas. With the boom in production from hydraulic fracturing, the United
States is awash in natural gas for the near future and is considering
exporting it, but the DOE wants to be ready with methane if there's a
need. "If you wait until you need it, and then you have 20 years of
research to do, that's not a good plan," said Ray Boswell, technology
manager for methane hydrates within the DOE's National Energy Technology
Laboratory.
The nearly $29 million science experiment on the North Slope produced
1 million cubic feet of methane. Researchers have begun the complex task
of analyzing how the reservoir responded to extraction.
Much is unknown but interest has accelerated over the last decade,
said Tim Collett, a research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in
Denver. U.S. operators in Alaska, he said, may want to harvest methane
so they can re-injected it into the ground.
Crude oil is more lucrative than natural gas, which is routinely
injected into North Slope fields to maintain underground pressure to aid
in oil extraction.
Japan, Korea, India and China, however, want to cut down on natural
gas imports by burning methane. Japan is setting up for a production
test on a gas hydrate accumulation in the Nankai Trough south of Honshu,
its main island. "That will be the first marine gas hydrate test
anywhere in the world," Collett said.
The U.S. Energy Department describes methane hydrate as a lattice of
ice that traps methane molecules but does not bind them chemically. They
are released when warmed or depressurized.
Methane comes from buried organic matter after it's ingested by
bacteria or heated and cooked. The gas migrates upward, under high
pressure and low temperature, and can combine with water to form methane
hydrate.
Most deposits are below the sea floor off the continental shelf or
under permafrost. Shallow pockets of methane hydrate release the potent
greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and that process is exacerbated by
climate warming.
Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity said research
money should be poured into renewable resources, not more fossil fuel
sources.
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