Asian Countries Eyeing Seabeds for Energy
12.15.07 - 06:32pm
In a bit of oddball Energy news, a slew of Asian countries are looking at mining the seabeds to harvest methane that has been locked away in frozen water. Unlike atmospheric methane that resides in a gaseous state in the upper reaches of our atmosphere, methane hydrate is a methane laden form of solid water. This methane hydrate once was thought to litter the seafloors but modern estimates place the quantity of accessibly methane hydrate between 500 and 2500 gigatonnes Carbon. Now I don’t know precisely what this means, but a metric ton is rather heavy, so I imagine a gigaton is enormous and with my powers of observation I would conclude that 500 to 2500 gigatonnes Carbon blocks of methane hydrate would be enough to get excited about. Now all these numbers were taken from Wikipedia but I’m going to assume for simplicity that the writer of the Methane Hydrate article actually used those references he listed and didn’t just list a few scientific sounding surveys. Back to the actual topic, China, India, South Korea, and Taiwan are amongst the Asian nations that are pursuing research into methane hydrate mining. There are many complications involved in mining methane hydrate but given enough time I am sure such issues will be resolved in hopefully a clean manner in regards to the environment.
A map of methane hydrate deposits around the world
The source that prompted this news report makes a point of discussing the repercussions of mining the methane hydrate and they raise a few good points. Rather than searching for hydrocarbon sources of energy I really wish these countries would invest their research in non-Carbon sources of energy. Surely there must be a way to utilize the arid regions of the Gobi Desert for solar power generation or coastal winds for windmill farms. Considering how China has already surpassed the United States as the largest producer of CO2 and there will still be years of economic growth in China, these things should be looked into before they invest time into additional carbon-based energy forms. If ever there was a time for energy-producing fusion plants, this would be one of them. Perhaps if these countries pursue methane hydrate mining they will implement some of the CO2 scavenging and storage techniques detailed in the source article.
A Tokamak used to contain the plasma generated during nuclear fusion
Source: www.spiegel.de
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