Beware Them Methane Hydrates

I written here and here about the promise/dangers involved in mining methane hydrates, or "flammable ice", from under-sea deposits. On the one hand, you wind up with natural gas, a relatively clean burning fossil fuel. On the other hand, you risk triggering "massive landslides" on the ocean floor, thus setting methane, a potent if short-lived greenhouse gas, loose in the atmosphere.

Reading New Scientist on the weekend, I came across an intriguing reference:

There are fears that disturbing the hydrates could trigger blowouts that might release huge volumes of gas. Around 8000 years ago, a sudden natural release from the North Sea bed near Norway triggered a tsunami that flooded much of Scotland.

They are talking about The Storegga Slide, which seems to have been caused by gas from undersea hydrate deposits "destabilizing the sediment pile". Here's a brief popular account of the episode, and here two slightly more scholarly versions.

Interesting in that a lot of new research done on the slide was in preparation for the opening of the Ormen Lange natural gas field off Norway. The upshot was that, in this location,

...the development of the...gas field would not significantly increase the risk of triggering a new slide.

So, there okay in Scotland, but in general: a risk of massive and sudden C02 emissions, and now Tsunamis. Can't we just try to, like, use less fuel?

PS. Tried desperately to find a picture of a Scotsman surfing in a kilt to illustrate this post. Unfortunately, Google images came up sorely lacking in this regard. Use your imagination, but don't peak!

Cue Godzilla

Japan is celebrating a groundbreaking science experiment in the Arctic permafrost that may eventually reshape the country's fragile economy and Tokyo's relationships with the outside world.

For an unprecedented six straight days, a state-backed drilling company has managed to extract industrial quantities of natural gas from underground sources of methane hydrate - a form of gas-rich ice once thought to exist only on the moons of Saturn.

In fact, the seabeds around the Japanese coast turn out to conceal massive deposits of the elusive sorbet-like compound in their depths, and a country that has long assumed it had virtually no fossil fuels could now be sitting on energy reserves containing 100 years' fuel. Critically for Japan, which imports 99.7 per cent of the oil, gas and coal needed to run its vast economy, the lumps of energy-filled ice offer the tantalising promise of a little energy independence.

Can't really fault the Japanese for wanting to get at this stuff, but there are lots and lots of environmental problems associated with methane mining, which I have written about here. My favorite is the (admittedly small) possibility to a catastrophic release of methane, a nasty if short-lived greenhouse gas. To ask "Can we mine [methane hydrates] without triggering a disaster that makes the K-T event look mild by comparison"? may overstate the danger, but even Japanese scientists are worried that drilling into the unstable deposits off their country's coast might trigger "massive landslides" on the ocean floor, thus setting hydrates loose in the atmosphere.

A couple of points in conclusion. Firstly, the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum was a time of mass extinction thought to have been caused in part by a vast release of methane hydrate, so doomsday warnings like the one above are not entirely ungrounded. Secondly, the "underground source" noted in the piece is almost certainly the Mallik research well, located in the Mackenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories. This experiment is a Japanese/Canadian co-venture. Your tax dollars at work.

Canada Rolling The Dice On Methane Hydrate

From Bloomberg, this story about Japan's attempts to wean itself from imported energy by drilling for methane hydrate:

Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Fifty-five million years ago the world's climate was catastrophically changed when volcanoes melted natural gas frozen in the seabed. Now Japan plans to drill for the same icy crystals to end its reliance on imported energy.

A small problem, however:

While governments are attracted to an abundant clean fuel, drilling risks disturbing the seabed and triggering an uncontrolled release, says Matsumoto of the University of Tokyo.

``A mass release of methane into the sea and the atmosphere is a risk for global warming,'' he says. ``Massive landslides at the ocean floor must be avoided when drilling at the Nankai Trough.''

The uncontrolled release of methane has already been tagged as the likely culprit in at least one mass extinction, and some of the dangers inherent in extracting the stuff are outlined here. These dangers can be summed up as follows: "Can we mine [methane hydrates] without triggering a disaster that makes the K-T event look mild by comparison"?

And the most interesting thing about the Japanese efforts is that Natural Resources Canada (Gary Lunn's department) is pitching in to help out:

Through the Geological Survey of Canada, ESS [Earth Sciences Sector] is a leader in the Mallik 2002 Production Research Well Program, one of the world's most important gas hydrates research programs. This project is a partnership with an international consortium of researchers from Canada, Japan, the US, Germany, and India. The Mallik research well site, located in the Mackenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories, represents one of the highest concentrations of gas hydrates found to date in the world.

Now that's rolling the dice big-time, in a manner Brian Mulroney probably could never have conceived of. And I'm not sure its the kind of project I want to see my tax dollars paying for.

PS. Yeah but what does the graph mean? On it "PETM" refers to Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum, the time of mass extinction thought to have been caused by a vast release of methane hydrate caused by an ongoing bout of global warming. I should have worked that into the body of the post, but forgot and now I'm too lazy.