Tia Ghose reports that a highly combustible form of energy locked deep in the ocean finally can be harvested using a new technique, but deploying that technique on a broad scale could spell trouble for the climate, experts say.
The solid material, called methane hydrate, is a form of the hydrocarbon methane that is locked in cages of ice called clathrates. Though billions of tons of this form of methane may be locked deep beneath the ocean floor, scientists had no safe or simple way to extract the material and convert it into a form that could be used.
But in a new demonstration, Chinese scientists say they have converted methane hydrate directly into usable natural gas on a floating platform in the South China Sea, the South China Morning Post reported.
Regardless of whether the China demonstration can be scaled up, any significantly increased use of hydrate-derived natural gas (or any other fossil fuel) would lead to continuing unabated fossil-fuel greenhouse-gas emissions, not to mention prolonged dependence on fossil fuels, said Pushker Kharecha, an Earth scientist at Columbia University who was not involved in the work.
In order to mitigate the climate crisis, rather than harvesting more fossil fuels, we must instead scale up clean energy sources like renewables and nuclear as rapidly as possible, by as much as possible, Kharecha told Live Science in an email.
Other experts agreed. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, about a factor of 30 times more potent per molecule than carbon dioxide, but methane gas average lifetime is only about 10 years, Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, told Live Science. They end up being oxidized (burnt) and end up as carbon dioxide. Some have argued that replacing dirty, carbon-intensive energy sources such as coal with slightly less carbon-intensive sources such as natural gas could reduce total emissions.
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