| Brad Plumer, Washington Post. Relevant to GSS Energy
Use chapter 3. Excerpt: Japan is in a tough spot, energy-wise. The
nation imports nearly all of its oil and natural gas. Most of its
nuclear reactors have been shut down after Fukushima. Wind and solar are
still in the early stages of ramping up. ...Japan is currently trying
to tap into undersea deposits of methane hydrates — also known as “fire
ice” — in hopes of converting the trapped methane into usable natural
gas. On Tuesday, Japan announced a major new breakthrough. For the first
time, a team aboard the drilling ship Chikyu had successfully extracted
gas from a layer of methane hydrates 1,000 feet below the seabed in the
Eastern Nankai Trough. ... Methane hydrates are essentially cage-like
lattices of water molecules that contain methane, the chief ingredient
in natural gas. They can be found either beneath the seafloor or
underneath Arctic permafrost ...gas hydrates could contain between
10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of
natural gas. Some of that gas will never be accessible at reasonable
prices. But if even a fraction of that total can be commercially
extracted, that’s an enormous amount. To put this in context, U.S. shale
reserves are estimated to contain 827 trillion cubic feet of natural
gas. ...The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there’s more carbon
trapped inside gas hydrates than is contained in all known reserves of
fossil fuels.... See full article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/12/japan-tries-to-unlock-the-worlds-biggest-source-of-carbon-based-fuel/. |
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