Should World Powers Drill for Long Frozen and Possibly Dangerous Methane from Hydrates November 14, 2008

U.S. Study Finds Large Alaska Frozen Natural Gas Deposits Could Be Extracted With Current Tools

By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON November 12, 2008 (AP)

Government scientists believe Alaska’s North slope has huge deposits of frozen natural gas that current technology could extract, according to an Interior Department report.

Read the full first article here:   http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=6237613

Doomsday? Or simply unfounded panic

Commentary by Bob Ferrari:

This report will cite that “methane is 27 times more potent than carbon dioxide in contributions to global warming”.  I would like you, the reader, to remember this little fact, and also know that Alaska is not the only place in the world that has such massive frozen methane deposits.  Japan is also onto this track, but Japan is already doing something about, NOW. The “scary” part of all this, is within this first sentence in the second article:

An international drilling expedition to the Nankai Trough off Japan’s southwest coast, one of the most volatile earthquake zones on Earth, has discovered that there is strong variation in the tectonic stresses in the area.

While CO₂ exists in much stronger concentration than the other greenhouse gases, there are a bunch of other gases that are more potent than CO₂ , by volume. That’s why, even though CO₂ is measured in parts per million while methane is measured in parts per billion, methane is a strong 2nd place in terms of its climate effect. In other words, when it comes to “global warming”, methane is one of the worst gases to be playing around with.

Second article:   

Caught in the Vice Between Tectonic Plates

http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=28875

Japan is looking to drill here:

Caught in the vice between two converging rigid tectonic plates, the wedge was found to be undergoing strain in preparation for the next earthquake,’ says co-chief scientist Masataka Kinoshita of the Institute for Research on Earth Evolution (IFREE) at the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).

Third article:

China and India Exploit Icy Energy Reserves

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,523178,00.html 

China and India have reported massive finds of frozen methane gas off their coasts, which they hope will satisfy their energy needs. But environmentalists fear that tapping these resources could have adverse effects on the world climate.

 

 

Judging by all three stories, what do you think about current and future attempts at extracting frozen methane from beneath the Earth?  The Alaska methane does not seem to quite raise the spectre of a world-wide Dante’s Inferno quite like the Japanese mucking in the “earthquake volatile” Nankai Trough.