Friday, December 12, 2008

Powering the Future

When I was a kid I would read the Junior Scholastic that carried fabulous stories of planes powered by nuclear reactors. I avidly read the reports that nuclear fusion was "just around the corner" and would make energy too cheap to meter.

This may be pie in the sky, but all those worries about "peak oil" may be as silly as the worries in the 1970s of "limits to growth" or the worries about overpopulation in the 1960s. Here's an energy source that is on the horizon. Hopefully more firmly on the horizon than nuclear fusion. This is from the Energy Outlook blog by :
The US Geological Survey released a report estimating that 85 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of technically recoverable gas hydrates are accessible on the Alaskan North Slope. If produced over 20 years and combined with the conventional gas supply from the North Slope, which has been waiting for a pipeline south for many years, this deposit could supply up to a third of total US natural gas consumption. But that barely scratches the surface of the overall potential of gas hydrates.

The reason this announcement is so significant lies in the words "technically recoverable." Geologists have known about gas hydrates for a long time, and estimates of global hydrate deposits have been refined to a range of between 100,000 and a million TCF, with the best estimate of US hydrate deposits currently at 200,000 TCF. To put that in perspective, one TCF of natural gas represents about 1% of US annual total energy consumption and contains the same energy as 180 million barrels of oil or 10 billion gallons of ethanol. In other words, that 200,000 TCF estimate is the equivalent of a 2,000-year energy supply for the US, at current consumption levels, of a fuel with half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal. If we could learn enough from tapping the identified deposit on the North Slope, we might be able to exploit the much larger, less accessible deposits elsewhere--and it should tell you something that the North Slope of Alaska looks easy in this regard.

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