US In Race To
Unlock
New
Energy Source
By David Adam
04 April, 2005
The
Guardian
More
than a mile below the choppy Gulf of Mexico waters lies a vast, untapped
source of energy. Locked in mysterious crystals, the sediment beneath
the seabed holds enough natural gas to fuel America's energy-guzzling
society for decades, or to bring about sufficient climate change to
melt the planet's glaciers and cause catastrophic flooding, depending
on whom you talk to.
No prizes for guessing
the US government's preferred line. This week it will dispatch a drilling
vessel to the region, on a mission to bring this virtually inexhaustible
new supply of fossil fuel to power stations within a decade.
The ship will hunt
for methane hydrates, a weird combination of gas and water produced
in the crushing pressures deep within the earth - literally, ice that
burns.
The stakes could
not be higher: scientists reckon there could be more valuable carbon
fuel stored in the vast methane hydrate deposits scattered under the
world's seabed and Arctic permafrost than in all of the known reserves
of coal, oil and gas put together.
"The amount
of energy there is just too big to ignore," said Bahman Tohidi,
head of the centre for gas hydrate research at Heriot Watt University
in Edinburgh. "It's not easy, but it's not something we can say
we can't do so let's forget about it."
Britain may miss
out on any future methane hydrate boom - the North Sea is too shallow
and no deposits have been found in the deeper waters further north -
but other countries have recognised their potential. Japan, India and
Korea, as well as the United States, are investing millions of pounds
in hydrate research.
Ray Boswell, who
heads the hydrate programme at the US department of energy's national
energy technology laboratory, said the US was determined to be the first
to mine the resource.
"Commercially
viable production is definitely realistic within a decade. The world
is investing in hydrates, and one reason for us to do this is to maintain
our leadership position in this emerging technology."
Its new project
will see the drilling vessel Uncle John spend about a month in the Gulf
of Mexico, where it will bore down to two of the largest expected methane
hydrate deposits in the region. Scientists on the ship will collect
samples for experiments to see how the methane might be freed and transported
to the surface.
This is harder than
it sounds. In some deposits the crystals occur in thick layers, in others
they are found as smaller nuggets. Puncture one hydrate reservoir and
the giant release of gas can disrupt drilling, pierce another and getting
the methane out is like sucking porridge through a straw.
This unpredictable
nature means energy companies traditionally view hydrates as a nuisance.
This gives them a joint interest with the US government as both sides
want to know where the crystals are - one to avoid them and the other
to exploit them.
Mr Boswell said:
"We have a marriage of near-term industry interests and longer-term
government interests. If they develop the ability to detect hydrates
for the purpose of avoiding them, that's useful for people who want
to do the exact same thing for the purpose of finding them."
Devinder Mahajan,
a chemist at the US department of energy's laboratory in Brookhaven,
is looking for ways to encourage subsea hydrate deposits to release
their methane. He has developed a pressurised tank that allows scientists
to study hydrate formation. "You fill the vessel with water and
sediment, put in methane gas and cool it down under high pressure. After
a few hours, the hydrates form, you can actually see it. They look like
ice, but they're not," he said. "This is a very important
issue, tied to our future national energy security."
Hydrates on land
are easier to get at, and in 2003 a team of oil companies and scientists
from Canada, Japan, India, Germany and the US showed it was possible
to produce methane from the icy deposits below Canada's Northwest Territories.
BP and the US government are carrying out similar experiments in Alaska.
Environmental groups
oppose attempts to extract methane from hydrate reserves.
Roger Higman, a
climate change campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: "The
Americans are desperately looking around trying to boost their fossil
fuels because they think the oil is going to run out or there's going
to be a scarcity. The actual scarcity is in the space the atmosphere
has for taking the carbon dioxide that burning methane produces."
He added: "We
already have enough fossil fuel in the world that, if burnt, will ruin
the world's climate. Rather than look for more, we need to keep the
oil, gas and coal we already know about underground and develop alternative
sources of energy, principally renewables."
Paul Johnston, a
scientist in the Greenpeace laboratory at Exeter University, warned
that disturbing hydrate deposits under the seabed was a risky strategy.
"There are
legitimate concerns that attempts to tap into these reserves could cause
very widespread destabilisation of the seabed and damage to ecosystems,"
he said.
Methane is a far
more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, he said, and any released
during production would make global warming worse.
Mr Boswell said
methane was more environmentally friendly than oil and coal, because
it produced less carbon dioxide when burnt.
"The prudent
approach is to address all the avenues for supplying future energy,"
he said. "People who say it has to be one or the other, I think,
are putting too many eggs in one basket."
Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005