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China claims breakthrough in mining 'flammable ice'
- lightedman 9y agoMuch better alternative to coal, at least. You emit far less CO2 per KWh generated and the only other byproduct besides CO2 tends to be water.
- Retric 9y agoProbably though it depends on how much CO2 it takes to mine / transport / refine etc.
- lightedman 9y agoMove to methane-powered equipment to mine the methane. Or solar-powered.
- Robotbeat 9y agoMAYBE. Methane leaks are incredibly destructive as methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. And mining this stuff could cause leaks.
- Freestyler_3 9y agoAllthough you could also argue that because of warming these gasses might escape if we don't mine them before that.
- stcredzero 9y agoAll you need is for someone to come up with a way to capture a lot of methane very cheaply but very inefficiently. Then a swarm of marginal operators will go in with that technique and release gigafktons of methane.
- djrogers 9y agoThe real concern here is that the country that's furthest along in extracting the methane is also pretty low on the list of countries that take great care with environmental concerns. As the article points out, the biggest danger with this as a NG source is that a lot of methane can escape before you've extracted it, and the methane that escapes is a huge concern as a greenhouse gas.
- stcredzero 9y agoTom Clancy movie plot: Apocalyptic extremist group gets hold of a nuclear weapon and plots to use it to release a large amount of methane. However, it doesn't stop there. They also ignite the methane to create an ongoing reaction heat the hydrate deposit to release additional billions of tons of methane. Slightly more sophisticated movie plot: Market forces accomplish basically the same thing over the period of a few decades, which still results in a runaway positive feedback loop causing more methane hydrates to release, making it warmer, etc.
- dharma1 9y agothe second plot is much more likely to happen, unfortunately problems spanning a few decades don't make great movies or seem to be addressable by humans generally
- wohlergehen 9y ago"The Swarm" by Frank Schätzing has a semi-related plot circling around the clathrate gun hypothesis.
- alphydan 9y ago> pretty low on the list of countries that take great care with environmental concerns The truth is not as simple as the western media makes it out to be. Between the US and China there are more than 40 countries in CO2 emissions per capita. In other words, one of the least responsible countries is the US (If you took a province of China with 200 million inhabitants, it would be an extremely responsible country compared to a country of similar size. Per capita, it sits right next to Iceland at around 6 tonnes of CO2/person)[0] China is also the number one investor in renewable energy (more than double what the US is investing). Per capita, they are similar players with the US ahead. [1] So it all depends on how you slice your data. Objectively it's easy to say that China is one of the most responsible countries in terms of global warming. Now whether it's just a matter of poverty and whether their growth strategy involves "de-carbonizing" de economy ... it's hard to say. However, taping the clathrates without capture sounds like sucide. [0] http://cotap.org/per-capita-carbon-co2-emissions-by-country http://cotap.org/per-capita-carbon-co2-emissions-by-country [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/top-renewable-energy-investments-by-country-2016-3/ http://www.businessinsider.com/top-renewable-energy-investme...
- Robotbeat 9y agoTapping clathrates is a whole new vast source of carbon. If this becomes economical and drastic measures aren't taken to capture and store the emissions, the climate is basically toast. In the last few years, it has become quite obvious to me we're not going to ever run out of carbon before we, say, octuple (or more) the CO2 in the atmosphere. And the technology to get these fossil fuel sources improves just about as fast as other energy technologies (and sometimes faster). We have to rely on measures other than scarcity if we want to keep our atmospheric CO2 levels anywhere even remotely similar to what homo sapiens have experienced since we've been a species.
- Robotbeat 9y agoClathrates are one possible positive feedback mechanism that could quickly (i.e. human lifespan) increase the Earth's temperature in response to an initial (human-caused) smaller heat pulse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- unchocked 9y agoThis PR is about obscuring the military basis of Chinese maritime territorial claims. Incidentally, it's not the first time methane clathrates have been used as cover for military purposes. The CIA-funded Glomar Explorer was nominally built for clathrate mining; in fact it was a recovery vessel for a sunken Soviet submarine.
- elefanten 9y agoHow does this serve to obscure the military basis? By implying they have an economic basis instead, or as well? I doubt that's much of a net PR win, because either way they would be facing the same charge of trying to claim territory that doesn't belong to them.
- Schizotypy 9y agoClaiming areas that don't belong to them is one of China's strong points, they do it all the time and there's a dispute in the China Sea that could tie into this
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoPolitics. Claiming areas that don't belong to them is one of the human species persistent activities. I'll never understand French Polynesia or the Falkland Islands, but there you go.
- unchocked 9y agoChinese maritime claims have no basis in law, but they want to maximize their legitimacy anyhow. One avenue is through military dominance, which is very powerful but invites resistance/blowback. By adding claims of intended economic exploitaion, they get a rationale which is non-threatening, and can be used by anyone who wants to avoid conflict with China to say "see, their aims aren't so hostile after all." They don't have to make the charge go away, they just need to FUD it.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago"The CIA-funded Glomar Explorer was nominally built for clathrate mining" Manganese nodules, actually.
- rbanffy 9y agoYay! More CO2!
- macawfish 9y ago"So the trick is to extract the gas without any of it slipping out." Why should we expect energy companies to be capable of this, given their environmental track records for other fuels?