Race begins for wonder gas 'frozen under sea'

From the Climate Policy Network -16 January 2012

Race begins for wonder gas ‘frozen under sea’

A discovery by scientists may have more than doubled the world’s energy reserves. They have found vast amounts of natural gas frozen into the sea bed, potentially containing more energy than all the world’s known coal, oil and gas reserves combined. The research follows the growing excitement generated by Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (Jogmec), which has been drilling test wells into methane hydrate reserves in the Nankai trough, off Japan’s southwest coast. It predicts the first gas will be extracted this year, and suggests there could be enough methane hydrate in the trough to supply all Japan’s energy for 300 years. --Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times, 15 January 2012

 

This month, scientists will test a new way to extract methane from beneath the frozen soil of Alaska: they will use waste carbon dioxide from conventional wells to force out the desired natural gas. --Nicola Jones, Nature, 13 January 2012

 

The crash in gas prices strikes at the heart of a traditional green argument — that rising energy prices will eventually force a conversion to green energy. To hear them tell it, dwindling oil and gas supplies will drive energy prices into the stratosphere, turning the expensive “green” energy sources into profitable enterprises overnight. They’ve been making this argument since the first solar energy boom back in the 1970s, and, so far, nothing. --Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 13 January 2012

 

As shale moves into an economic story, it will become a political one. Most obviously this sets the stage for an Obama victory by default later this year. The two battleground swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio are at the epicenter of the shale boom, and those in work in the states won't be interested in how they got those jobs - just that they have them. Democrats will ignore, or oppose, shale at their peril. The impact of shale on the US economy and politics will be too compelling for Europeans to ignore. The key question of shale worldwide is going to be: If the US can do this, why not us? --Nick Grealy, No Hot Air, 12 January 2012

 

IT WAS billed as a scientific breakthrough providing a clean-energy future for the planet. The poster that lured the good folk of Mullumbimby said: "Hello clean, green, renewable, inexpensive cold fusion. You are invited to a public meeting." There was to be a Skype link-up to Italy with the physicist Andrea Rossi, who would explain how his E-cat machine could take a small amount of energy and turn it into lots of energy. Something for nothing. But when it was time for the link-up, the phone didn't ring. And it didn't ring. --Tim Barlass, The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2012

 

 

1) Race begins for wonder gas ‘frozen under sea’ - The Sunday Times, 15 January 2012

2) Energy For 1000 Years? Gas-Hydrate Tests To Begin In Alaska - Nature, 13 January 2012

3) Bakken Shale Oil Scores First Victory Against OPEC - TheStreet, 11 January 2012

4) Nick Grealy: Will Shale Gas Boom Save Obama? - No Hot Air, 12 January 2012

5) Another Benefit of Fracking: Cheap Heat - Via Meadia, 13 January 2012

6) And Finally: Cold Feet Rather Than Cold Fusion - The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2012

 

1) Race begins for wonder gas ‘frozen under sea’

The Sunday Times, 15 January 2012

Jonathan Leake

A discovery by scientists may have more than doubled the world’s energy reserves. They have found vast amounts of natural gas frozen into the sea bed, potentially containing more energy than all the world’s known coal, oil and gas reserves combined. The methane gas is mixed with water, and frozen solid by the high pressure and low temperatures in the deep sea.

 

Methane hydrate, as the substance is known, has long been regarded by oil and gas companies as a nuisance, because it can block marine drilling rigs. Now a study by Statoil, Norway’s state oil firm and a leading global gas producer, suggests it should be reclassified as a significant fuel resource, with enough buried in the oceans to power the world for decades or even centuries.

“The energy content of methane occurring in hydrate form is immense, possibly exceeding the combined energy content of all other known fossil fuels,” said Espen Andersen, Statoil’s exploration manager in unconventional hydrocarbons, who will present his study at an energy conference next week.

Such claims will anger environmentalists, who fear that global exploitation of the deep sea bed would put marine life at risk, especially whales and dolphins, which are sensitive to noise. It would also mean an increase in the burning of fossil fuel — so worsening climate change.

The research follows the growing excitement generated by Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (Jogmec), which has been drilling test wells into methane hydrate reserves in the Nankai trough, off Japan’s southwest coast.

It predicts the first gas will be extracted this year, and suggests there could be enough methane hydrate in the trough to supply all Japan’s energy for 300 years.

Such discoveries have sparked a global search to find other areas with high concentrations of methane hydrate, with Statoil one of the leading companies involved. Huge reserves are already believed to lie off China, South Korea and India, countries that are all currently reliant on imports.

See also: Methane Hydrates: The Next Energy Revolution?

 

2) Energy For 1000 Years? Gas-Hydrate Tests To Begin In Alaska

Nature, 13 January 2012

Nicola Jones

This month, scientists will test a new way to extract methane from beneath the frozen soil of Alaska: they will use waste carbon dioxide from conventional wells to force out the desired natural gas.

The pilot experiment will explore the possibility of ‘mining’ from gas hydrates: cages of water ice that hold molecules of methane. Such hydrates exist under the sea floor and in sandstone deep beneath the Arctic tundra, holding potentially vast reserves of natural gas. But getting the gas out is tricky and expensive.

The test is to be run by the US Department of Energy (DOE), in conjunction with ConocoPhillips, an oil company based in Houston, Texas, and the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation. The researchers will pump CO2 down a well in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, into a hydrate deposit. If all goes as planned, the CO2molecules will exchange with the methane in the hydrates, leaving the water crystals intact and freeing the methane to flow up the well.

Conventional wells in the Prudhoe Bay gas fields contain a very high concentration of carbon dioxide — about 12% of the gas. “You have to find something to do with it,” says Ray Boswell, technology manager for methane hydrates at the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia. One way to dispose of it is to bury the gas underground. Excess carbon dioxide is already pumped down some conventional wells to encourage extraction of the last bits of natural gas; using it to extract methane from hydrates might be a good idea too.

Fuel test

The test will use the Ignik Sikumi well, which was drilled on an ice platform in Prudhoe Bay last winter. Specialized equipment has been installed, including fibre-optic cables to measure the temperature down the well, and injection pipes for the CO2. “None of this is standard equipment; it had to be built to design,” says Boswell.

ConocoPhillips helped the team to get access to the site. “That’s one of the biggest hurdles — getting industry to let you do an experiment in their field,” says Boswell, who has been working to arrange such tests in Alaska since 2001. “There’s a lot of inertia to overcome. Prudhoe is where they make their money,” he adds.

During the test, the researchers will inject nitrogen gas into the hydrate deposit to try to push away any free water in the system, which would otherwise freeze into hydrates on exposure to CO2 and block up the well. The next phase is to pump in isotopically labelled CO2, and let it ‘soak’ for a week before seeing what comes back up. This will help to test whether the injected carbon is really swapping places with the carbon in the hydrates. Finally, the team will depressurize the well and attempt to suck up all the methane and carbon dioxide. This will also give them a chance to test extraction using depressurization — sucking liquids out of the hydrate deposits to reduce pressure in the well and coax the methane out of the water crystals. “We’ll continue to depressurize until we run out of time or money, and see how much methane we can get out that way,” says Boswell.

Field of dreams

This is not the first attempt to extract methane from hydrates. In 2002, experiments at the Mallik Field site in northern Canada pumped hot water underground to 'melt' hydrates and release the methane. In 2008, further tests at the same site tried depressurization. That scheme seems most likely to be commercially viable, says Boswell. “The tests were very short and the modelling has so many moving parts, no one knows exactly what the production rate will be,” he says. “But the test well produced more than the models said it would.”

The CO2–methane exchange method to be tested at Prudhoe Bay removes the need to either add water or dispose of extracted fluids, and doesn’t risk destabilizing the ground by melting the hydrate. It also has the added bonus of getting rid of unwanted gas, which would offset the price of commercial operations. “It doesn’t have to produce methane at a great rate, because you’re also disposing of CO2,” says Boswell.

“The concept is very alluring,” says Scott Dallimore, a hydrate expert with the Geological Survey of Canada in Sidney, British Columbia. “Gas fields in this area have a relatively high CO2 concentration. If this CO2 can be re-injected while at the same time producing methane, it will be a terrific option.”

Commercialization is still a long way off. The United States has no urgent need to mine methane hydrates, says Boswell, because it will continue to have access to much cheaper natural-gas resources for some time to come. Japan is much closer to commercialization: the country plans to open a short-term production well in the offshore Nankai Trough in 2013, with the aim of running a longer production test in 2015. The country is “quite eager” to explore the potential of hydrates, says Boswell, because it has few other fossil-fuel resources.

“There’s a perception out there that this is a wild fantasy. That’s not true. I am convinced that the research community has already demonstrated the technical viability of gas-hydrate production,” says Dallimore. “When it comes to the question of commercial viability, things become more complex.”

See also: Japan And The US Team To Explore North Slope Methane Hydrates

 

3) Bakken Shale Oil Scores First Victory Against OPEC

TheStreet, 11 January 2012

Eric Rosenbaum

Score one for U.S. energy independence at a time of escalating tensions between Iran and the West.

On Tuesday afternoon, North Dakota, home to the booming Bakken oil shale, announced that it had scored its first victory over OPEC. Bakken production in November passed the mark of half a million barrels of oil per day, at about 510,000 barrels, surpassing Ecuador.

It's probably worth pointing out Ecuador is the "Rhode Island" of OPEC. In the same way that metaphors looking to make just about any small land area in the world look big use the comparison of Rhode Island, Ecuador is the only OPEC nation that the Bakken can rival, representing 0.6% of OPEC reserves, or roughly 476,000 barrels daily.

Next in line for the Bakken in its bid to overtake all the OPEC nations? For comparison purposes, second-to-last among OPEC nations in production is Qatar, at 733,000 barrels of oil daily. Algeria, at 1.1 million barrels per day, is next in line after Qatar.

At the top end of the OPEC list are Venezuela, producing 2.8 million barrels daily; Saudi Arabia, at over 8 million barrels of oil produced daily; and of course, our current geopolitical foe, Iran, producing more than 3.5 million barrels per day, according to OPEC data.

The leapfrog over Ecuador leaves only 11 nations to go before the Bakken overtakes the entire OPEC oil cartel.

Full story

 

4) Nick Grealy: Will Shale Gas Boom Save Obama?

No Hot Air, 12 January 2012

Just in case you missed this last week:

2012 will be the year when the acceleration in US economic growth becomes the global growth story that came out of left field - just as shale itself appeared to most to come out of nowhere. Shale will be the story too big to ignore.

As shale moves into an economic story, it will becomes a political one. Most obviously this sets the stage for an Obama victory by default later this year. The two battleground swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio are at the epicenter of the shale boom, and those in work in the states won't be interested in how they got those jobs - just that they have them. Obama's opposition who ever that will be won't hurt, but the Democrats will see what side their bread is buttered on. Democrats will ignore, or oppose, shale at their peril. The impact of shale on the US economy and politics will be too compelling for Europeans to ignore. The key question of shale worldwide is going to be: If the US can do this, why not us?

Don't miss this:

The White House briefing paper that accompanied the “insourcing” event attributes much of the rebound in manufacturing to the boom in domestic natural gas production, made possible by new “fracking” technologies. The federal government didn’t do much specifically to promote fracking. Yet the process has dramatically cut the price of gas, a key industrial input, and led to spinoff employment in related industries. The White House notes that more of such development, appropriately regulated, could have “substantial” benefits to the U.S. economy. Even in a polarized Washington, everyone should be able to agree on that.

Editor’s Note: see also  White House briefing paper: Investing in America: Building an Economy That Lasts

 

5) Another Benefit of Fracking: Cheap Heat

Via Meadia, 13 January 2012

Walter Russell Mead

The crash in gas prices strikes at the heart of a traditional green argument — that rising energy prices will eventually force a conversion to green energy. To hear them tell it, dwindling oil and gas supplies will drive energy prices into the stratosphere, turning the expensive “green” energy sources into profitable enterprises overnight. They’ve been making this argument since the first solar energy boom back in the 1970s, and, so far, nothing.

A rare piece of good news from the Rust Belt: residents of states like Pennsylvania and Ohio will be a little warmer this winter as they cling bitterly, in the President’s famous phrase, to their God and their guns.

The extensive shale gas deposits discovered deep underground in Pennsylvania and Ohio are making (natural) gas cheaper for everyone. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the high volume of gas pumping has sent gas prices plummeting to a two-year low.

What looks like bad news for energy companies is good news for consumers, who will find heating their homes through the winter much cheaper than in years past. In an age of cutbacks, cash-strapped families will be happy to see a drop in the cost of living, freeing up money for other priorities.

This strikes at the heart of a traditional green argument—that rising energy prices will eventually force a conversion to green energy. To hear them tell it, dwindling oil and gas supplies will drive energy prices into the stratosphere, turning the expensive “green” energy sources into profitable enterprises overnight. They’ve been making this argument since the first solar energy boom back in the 1970s, and, so far, nothing.

Meanwhile, the gas boom offers the Rust Belt its best shot to recover.  Brown jobs in the gas and oil energy may not have the glamor of beautiful (though, tragically, mostly imaginary) green jobs, but the pay is good and will help stop the decline of the middle class. And cheap energy won’t just give consumers a few extra bucks in their pockets; it reduces manufacturing costs and gives investors another reason to make a few things in the USA.

Fighting the gas boom while pumping money into corrupt, failing ventures like Solyndra makes good sense to the greens; it makes no sense at all to a lot of middle class voters in the Middle West. You will probably hear a lot about this issue next fall.

 

6) And Finally: Cold Feet Rather Than Cold Fusion

The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2012

Tim Barlass

IT WAS billed as a scientific breakthrough providing a clean-energy future for the planet. The poster that lured the good folk of Mullumbimby said: "Hello clean, green, renewable, inexpensive cold fusion. You are invited to a public meeting."

There was to be a Skype link-up to Italy with the physicist Andrea Rossi, who would explain how his E-cat machine could take a small amount of energy and turn it into lots of energy. Something for nothing.

It involved a reaction between atoms of hydrogen and nickel.

So about 100 Mullumbimby residents filed into the ex-services club on Friday night. The entrepreneur Dick Smith had offered to invest $200,000 if the physics was proven. He sent along a consulting aerospace engineer and sceptic, Ian Bryce, to assess the machine. In the hall were two screens, ready for the link-up.

Sol Millin, a local retiree and founder of The Byron New Energy Charitable Trust, spoke first, hoping to convince investors. But when it was time for the link-up, the phone didn't ring. And it didn't ring.

Mr Millin told The Sun-Herald: "I thought it was better if Dr Rossi rang us. He is a very important man and a very busy man and I didn't want to keep him waiting."

But they had their wires crossed, their timing out of sync. Each was expecting the other to call.

"I didn't bother to blame him and he didn't bother to blame me," Mr Millin said. "I was very disappointed - I was going to stand on the stage and talk directly to the inventor."

Asked if he though Mr Smith would invest in the project, Mr Millin replied: "Absolutely."

Mr Bryce has advised Mr Smith otherwise. "My view was that it was much too early to talk about investing. I have serious concerns about the invention's credibility and lack of sound scientific theory behind it."

Mr Smith said: "I said, get me some evidence and I will put some funding up, but they couldn't even organise the timing for a Skype link-up. I am very suspicious of the whole thing. I am not holding my breath. I will keep my $200,000 in the bank."

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