Why 'flammable ice' could be the future of energy | Hacker News Reader

Why 'flammable ice' could be the future of energy

bbc.com

54 pointsjonbaer39 comments

How is it the future of energy? As the article later states, "All the social and environmental issues associated with fossil fuels apply to gas hydrates ". It's later awkwardly explained as a transitional energy source, sure methane is more short lived but do we really want to gamble with the possible tippings that we have set ourselves up for?

yea this article is shit

> sure methane is more short lived

I don't know that this is helpful at all since it either burns or degrades to CO2, and is a significantly worse greenhouse gas before then.

I should have rephrased that! The main point is it seem to put us in a very risky situation with methane release. They're mentioning how doing the extraction can potentially destabilize the whole reserve and lead to massive releases.

Then there's also the eco system aspect. The environments surrounding the reserves have unique organisms. What's going to happen with that? Just because we don't see it, it doesn't seem to matter..

It is not emitted in similar quantities to CO2. It is remarkable that practically all of the charts of greenhouse gases show methane as a fraction already multiplied by its Global Warming Potential factor. Its sensible to present the gases already weighted, but when its not explicit enough and raw figures by weight are hard to come by - its pretty natural to do the math again and re-multiply by the GWP factor - resulting in a shocking discovery that methane is widely misunderstood or misreported.

However, global anthropogenic emission of methane is about 300 Tera-grams per year [1]. Anthropogenic emission of CO2 is about 35 Giga-tonnes per year.

300 Tera-grams is 0.3 Giga-tonnes

300 Tera-grams of CH4 degrades in about 10 years into about 0.5 Gigatonnes of CO2. About 1.5%, one sixtieth of the CO2 problem which can last hundreds of years. Methane emissions present 10-15% of the immediate and near term problem - thats less than half, less than a quarter... seriously, its about an eighth. After 10-15 years the elimination of methane, eliminates about a sixtieth of the global warming emissions problem. This will be why the IPCC presents CO2 as the major issue, because they do find and show that it is.

[1] (Table 1) http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/369/19...

Your logic boils down to: because its not as bad as CO2 its not bad?

Terra-grammes? Giga-tonnes? Did these two numbers come from different sources? This is not how the metric system is meant to be used.

Well there is a lyrical aspect, 300 Tera-grammes is also 300 Mega-tonnes but that sounds like the familiar nuclear weapon rating.

There are many sources in broad agreeance for these heavily researched measurements. I included one recent source for methane emissions by weight, since its a bit harder to dig that up.

The Japanese masterplan is to build a national hydrogen infrastructure, with H2 delivered to buildings and homes where it would both power domestic fuel cells and be burnt for heat, as well as provide fuel for Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

The primary motivation is energy independence: currently, Japan is the world's largest importer of both coal and natural gas.

As H2 would be supplied by reformation of methane hydrates, it is still a fossil fuel and does not solve carbon emissions. But the idea is that emissions would be substantially reduced compared to the current situation, where a large portion of Japan's energy is supplied by burning imported coal and oil.

Wouldn't it be easier to create a national methane infrastructure, reforming on the spot where pure H2 is required and methanate H2 when/where/if you can get it from non-fossil sources? Methane is much easier to handle for transport/storage.

It’s definitely an option, although methane reforming will produce carbon monoxide as a by-product and separating that from the hydrogen in a distributed setting (as opposed to centralized plant) is so energy intensive that it would likely offset any savings. Solid oxide fuel cells that run directly on methane are yet another alternative, but their problem is they run at around 600C...

It seems to be easier to upgrade a hydrogen distribution network to use carbon neutral hydrogen than to use a methane distribution network to use carbon neutral methane.

it would be BETTER to produce hydrogen from sustainable non-contributing-to-climate-change-further sources such as electrolysis of water from onsite hydrogen generation such as wind farms, when the grid is not buying, rather than spinning down, produce hydrogen.

Japan has very limited wind energy currently (< 1% of grid generation).

Unlike many European countries, Japan is surrounded by deep waters, which makes constructing offshore turbines more difficult and expensive. But the recent development of floating wind turbines which can operate in much deeper waters means that may change.

However, there is an argument that hydrogen electrolysis is not an efficient use of electricity. By the time you've electrolysed water, transported the H2, and converted it back to electricity in a fuel cell, you've lost at least 70% of the original energy.

So unless there is a lot of surplus electricity generation that would otherwise be wasted, it makes more sense to use it directly where possible. Storage technologies (such as chemical batteries, heat batteries) may be more economic than H2 electrolysis/distribution.

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang or whimper, but with a fart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Global warming is bad in terms of infrastructure, but would not make earth uninhabitable or anything.

Is predicted to made several large populated areas uninhabitable due to the wet bulb temperature rising past the limits of human survivability for much of the year.

If we burn or release the ocean methane deposits for any reason, most of the Earth's land surface would be uninhabitable to humans, meaning all unprotected humans would die.

Maybe there would still be habitable zones near the poles. Not certainly, but maybe.

[Citation needed] because as near as I can find that's really not on the table.

Remember temperature is very nonlinear, eventually adding atmospheric methane has a reduced effect as their is enough of it to block the spectra and adding more does little.

There is a chance that the oceans will warm more quickly than the phyplankton can survive. A massive die-off of phytoplankton would be catastrophic. It's our main source of oxygen and the basis for the marine food chain.

Source? Ocean phyplankton are very resistant to temperature changes.

Phytoplankton is already declining:

> We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ∼1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268

If you could find areas where warm waters killed them off that would be something, but some species of phytoplankton are known to survive to 40+°C.

"The 1980s saw a rapid increase in phytoplankton biomass in the North-east Atlantic. We now know this dramatic change was part of a regime shift—a climate-driven stepwise change in the structure and functioning of the north-east Atlantic marine ecosystem." https://www.mba.ac.uk/are-marine-phytoplankton-decline

Anyway, they are not simply being killed of in the warmest waters. Climate change means changes in ocean current circulation and other effects beyond simple changes in temperature.

What is the survivable level of atmospheric carbon?

I don't mean civilization as we know it. I mean mammals, specifically humans.

The tundra is thawing with no way to halt, much less reverse. Not an expert, but IIRC it holds 3x the carbon of total anthropogenic sources. That's bad, right?

Ocean acidification will remove that source of food. I don't know if it stops being a carbon sink at some point. What happens when the microscopic critters (plankton), which consumed carbon, can no longer survive?

Deforestation and desertification is transferring terrestrial carbon to the air. How much of that burns? Most of it?

Those three processes are now in a positive feedback loop. With no apparent inhibitors.

And humans keep consuming fossil fuels. Juicing the feedback loop.

What's projected atmospheric carbon of all those combined? 1200ppm? 2000ppm? Higher?

Ok, that's pretty bleak, right?

Is that a mass extinction event level of bleakness?

Now what happens if even a fraction of the frozen methane gets released?

Which critters are capable of surviving that?

Edit: I couldn't remember the values for the hottest period.

Eocene Epoch had 4000ppm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Atmospheric_greenhouse_...

And not everything died. So maybe there's some hope.

“The Center for Disease Control has designated 100,000 ppm of carbon dioxide as life-threatening.” So, that’s a very long way past 4,000. The workplace safty limit is set at 5,000 for 8 hours which is considered a very conservative and safe estimate.

Honestly, if we where looking at 40,000 I would be very concerned. But that’s vastly above anyone’s projections. So, CO2 is not going to be a direct threat to us. It’s knock on effects that’s the issue.

PS: Remember people can survive with significantly reduced lung capacity. Breathing is really important in terms of evolution so the ‘safty factor’ is huge.

Why wait for the clathrate gun to go off, when you can dig it up and ignite it yourself?

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so it might be less harmful to burn it (converting it into CO2) than to let it escape into the atmosphere intact.

But we might not have enough time to dig it all up and burn it before the clathrate gun goes off anyway.

The clathrate gun is the most scary doomsday scenario that's very reasonably likely to expect to happen in my lifetime.

It's also a good test for ones ability to cope with existential dread, just tell someone about it, point to the Wikipedia page and see how long it takes until they shutoff and say something like:"nah, we'll figure it out".

On another note, how valid is my anxiety regarding it, are there any pointers based in fact that this will really not be much of an issue?

We can offset the warming by a nuclear winter if necessary.

...well yeah, the worlwide famine and political instability coming after the massive climate change will kind of obviously lead to this, thank god for the nukes.

You know that doesn't just require detonating nukes in remote locations, which would be bad enough, but setting megacities on fire, right? And it's not something you can do repeatedly once the effects wear off. Climate change outlasts nuclear winter.

Just drop a dozen or so megaton bomb on the Yellowstone caldera and the rest will be taken care of.

The Wikipedia page portrays the issue as one with potentially catastrophic consequences, but ultimately as one needing further research. Calthrate fields that previously raised concern were found to be emmitting methane for reasons unrelated to anthropogenic global warming. Calthrates certainly deserve scientific attention, and not enough is being done to address global warming, but we don't know that a calthrate gun has ever fired in the Earth's past, and current theories for how one might be triggered in the near future have yet to be fleshed out in any detail.

So a new greenhouse-gas fuel is touted in a BBC headline as potentially “the future of energy”. Someone add 1988 to the headline.

So, a few years back when natural gas had just droppped to about $4/MMBtu due to the shale gas boom, I was doing research for a VC fund that wanted to invest in startups that converted methane to valuable products.

One of the most promising routes was to upgrade it to methanol; from there you can make chemicals with higher value, not just fuels to burn. The problem is that oxidation of methane is very unselective, meaning once you break the C-H bond it’ll cascade into carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide very quickly. I think the current record for methanol yield from methane oxidation is something abysmal like 3%.

The last slide of my presentation for them was about methane clathrates, basically reaffirming that yeah, this is definitely an area you should invest in because there’s literally an untapped ocean of methane that people will eventually dig up.

If any engineers working on this are here, please quit your jobs or sabotage this project.

I find it appalling that anyone would work to find new ways to add greenhouse gasses to our atmosphere.

Interesting video about making your own gas hydrates at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3trDB5hN4Ug

Energon cubes

Oh gee, more "burning stuff that's not hydrogen" aka one more producer of greenhouse gasses. Kickin' that can down the road....

I love one contributers assessment near the end of the article that it's "going to take awhile" to "transition"

"transition" = not doing something about the problem.

What part of "we have 10 years more or less to reduce our carbon emissions drastically to XYZ level or face tipping a very delicate chain reaction irrevocably on the side of disaster" is difficult to understand?

Incrementalism won't cut it. We need a renewably sustainably produced electrical energy system with on-site hydrogen generation for what still must combust (likely, chainsaws and such, depending upon motor designs etc...) or as a storage means. Hydrogen is the only substance that, when combined with oxygen rapidly aka "burned" produces water. Methane produces water AND CO2, a greenhouse gas.

Grow up.

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