Posted by
Gray Ghost on Thursday, November 13, 2008 8:30:35 AM
The National Society of Professional Engineers just sent its members a report concerning the following: "Frozen crystals packed with concentrated natural gas and buried 2,000 feet below the permafrost on Alaska's North Slope could become the next major domestic energy source." This study was released on Wednesday, November 11, 2008, by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The study finds that in the North Slope, frozen methane-and-water crystals known as hydrates contain as much as 85.4 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas. "That's enough to heat 100 million homes for as long as 10 years," Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said. The interior secretary added that, "globally, hydrates have more potential for energy than all other fossil fuels combined. ... This can be a paradigm shift."
Government research is beginning to show that it may be possible to extract hydrates using depressurization, a technique used to get at more conventional fuel sources. Steve Rinehart, a spokesman for British Petroleum in Alaska said that, "boring into the ground may be enough to change the pressure to extract it. ... Or the pressure could be changed by pumping."
Although there are tremendous hydrate deposits in Arctic regions, they also exist in the deepwater regions of the Gulf of Mexico, an area where there are existing natural gas pipelines. (Though much of the government research into hydrates has taken place in Alaska, it might be cheaper to consider the Gulf of Mexico first.)
I wonder how long this information concerning Alaska has been known? (Another point for my "conspiracy theories"?) You can read the news article at: