
Why 'flammable ice' could be the future of energy - jonbaer
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181119-why-flammable-ice-could-be-the-future-of-energy
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jesperlang
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?

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masklinn
> 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.

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strainer
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...](http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/369/1943/2058.full.pdf)

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)

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

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adrianN
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.

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Retric
Source? Ocean phyplankton are very resistant to temperature changes.

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adrianN
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](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268)

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Retric
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](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.

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

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Roritharr
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?

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

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the8472
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.

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

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

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plaidfuji
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.

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hackerbabz
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.

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

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vibrato
Energon cubes

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justaaron
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.

