Thursday, March 31, 2005

Playing With Frozen Fire





"An estimated 200,000 trillion cubic feet of methane hydrates exists under the sea, and the Department of Energy has a major research program under way that could result in commercial production starting by 2015."

Oh, boy. Another non-renewable greenhouse-inducing fuel to spend billions leaching from the surface of an ecologically impoverished planet.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

yes, but in this scenario, the transhuman must displace nature and destroy what we've come to know as the environment in the process... effectively 'borging' the planet

Anonymous said...

i read somewhere that in France they developed an engine that runs on air and causes no pollution, though whether or not that could be detrimental to the environment after a given period of time i am unsure of.

Anonymous said...

The petro junkies will find SOME way to maintain their hydrocarbon addiction, that's for sure.
--WMB

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't worry too much about it. Three rather large obstacles to any significant use of methane hydrates; a) it is exceedingly difficult to accumulate commercial quantities, b) harvesting it from the ocean floor is extremely hazardous work and c) it is ridiculously expensive in terms of the amount of energy expended versus the amount recovered.

Frankly, just about any alternatives to oil are red herrings. What most people fail to realize is that all such alternatives rely on cheap, plentiful oil to make them viable in the first place. The more scarce and expensive the oil becomes, the less feasible will the "alternatives" become...

Mac said...

Good points. By the time we begin really craving this stuff, we'll probably lack the infrastructure to do so.