Methane hydrate is the most abundant natural form of clathrate.

With global oil prices soaring and continued concerns over the security of gas supplies, the need to exploit alternative sources of fossil fuels has never been greater.
The US Geological Survey estimates that the amount of organic carbon stored as frozen natural gas under the Earth’s surface is greater than the world’s oil, coal and non-frozen, free gas reserves combined. Large reserves are thought to exist under the oceans off the coasts of Japan, China, India, Canada and Russia.
Like conventional natural gas, the methane held within these reserves was formed as a by-product by microbes feasting on organic matter trapped in sediment. In cold, high-pressure environments, water molecules form open solid lattices that trap methane molecules without chemical bonding--methane hydrates. It is thought that around 55 million years ago some event caused vast quantities of gas to be released from these structures, causing abrupt global warming, e4engineering.com reported.
Methane from hydrates is more environmentally friendly than normal natural gas as it produces less carbon dioxide when burned. However, accidental creation of a large uncontrollable leak could be catastrophic. Identifying and extracting methane from hydrates for commercial use thus presents an enormous technical challenge that has swallowed millions of research dollars in countries including Japan, Canada and the US.
The US National Energy Technology Laboratory’s National Methane Hydrate Programme, initiated in 1997, aims to develop technologies to allow the commercial production of gas from methane hydrates by 2015.
Last month researchers led by chemist Dr. Devinder Mahajan of the Advanced Fuels Group at the US government’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, announced they had come up with a method to recreate the high-pressure, low temperature conditions found on the seabed. This will allow scientists to design better methods for finding and extracting the methane, as seismic probes used to detect oil and gas deposits find it hard to identify deposits.
But in the same month the US suffered a setback when the National Science Foundation announced estimates of hydrate reserves in the northern Gulf of Mexico should be slashed as sediments were too warm and salty to hold large amounts of gas. Future funding for the $10m (£5m) per year National Methane Hydrate Programme is also uncertain. It ends this September and no new budget has been agreed by Congress. Other agencies are still free to fund hydrate extraction programs but their budget is only half that of NETL.
’The official position is that, with high energy prices, industry will pick up the shortfall,’ said Edith Allison, exploration program manager at NETL’s Office of Natural Gas and Petroleum Technology.
Now, another country is poised to join the quest. Though the Republic of Ireland may not have the spending power of larger nations, a group led by geologist Dr. Padraic Mac Aodha of the National University of Ireland, Galway, hopes they can leap ahead of larger nations.
Partnered with Dublin-based oil and gas firm Providence Resources and UK firm Sosina Exploration, the group is investigating the possibility of extracting methane from hydrates deposited within the continental shelf off the coast of County Mayo in the west of Ireland. If the fields can be exploited, it would eliminate the expense of importing natural gas from elsewhere in Europe and increase security of supply for a country situated precariously at the far end of the gas importation route. If all goes well, the natural gas would be extracted and converted to a very low emission diesel-like fuel so it can be transported without the need for a pipeline network.
The hydrates off Ireland are believed to consist of a crystalline solid behind which is a reservoir of free gas. If the gas is removed, this reduces the pressure on the hydrate and gas starts to be released from its base. However, the reaction is endothermic, cooling the remaining hydrate body and making it hard to extract.
If water or steam is pumped into the well the hydrate can be warmed, a technology used by scientists from the US, Canada, Japan, India and Germany during a joint operation to drill three wells at a site in the north west of Canada.

Nearly 30 years ago, Iceland was looking for ways to reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels and replace them with local, renewable sources-geothermal and hydroelectric power. But a chemistry professor named Bragi Arnason outlined a more ambitious goal. From his study of Iceland’s hot-water reserves, Arnason realized that the country was planning to tap only a small fraction of the energy resources that lay hidden beneath its volcanic surface. That convinced him that Iceland could become the first nation in the world to power its economy entirely with what is now widely seen as the energy of the future: hydrogen.
Arnason understood that Iceland offered a unique laboratory for exploring the potential of a hydrogen economy. The country’s small size (40,000 square miles) and population (just 294,000) would simplify the challenge of transforming its energy infrastructure. Most important, he believed that the energy required to split water molecules and produce hydrogen could be provided by Iceland’s cheap, abundant supplies of geothermal and hydroelectric power, fuelcelltoday.com reported.
The response was polite. People told Arnason, “Of course it would be nice if you could do that, but it’s a very long-term vision.“
In the 1990s, however, as scientists around the world made breakthroughs in hydrogen fuel-cell technology, Bragi Arnason’s dream began to seem less Utopian. Several multinational corporations, familiar with his ideas and attracted by the notion of using Iceland’s natural energy resources to produce hydrogen from water (rather than extracting it from a hydrogen-rich fuel such as liquefied natural gas or methanol), approached the Icelandic government to express their interest in implementing a national hydrogen plan.
In 1999, three of those corporations-Shell, Daimler-Chrysler, and the energy and metals company Norsk Hydro-joined forces with the Icelandic government, universities, research institutions, and business leaders under the banner of Icelandic New Energy (INE), a “cooperation platform“ whose goal was to power the country’s transportation system and fishing fleet entirely with hydrogen. The consortium is unique in the world.
Each company has made its own particular contribution to the project: Daimler-Chrysler has provided buses for the pilot phase, as it has for nine cities elsewhere in Europe; Norsk Hydro has the know-how for producing hydrogen; and Shell offers its long experience in delivering fuel to the public. The three corporations do not control the INE agenda, however; Icelandic stakeholders deliberately reserved for themselves a 51 percent majority of votes.
INE has embarked on a research phase that is expected to last 10 to 15 years-recognizing, like hydrogen backers everywhere, that full conversion will take 40 years or more. “The Icelandic government sees this as a marathon, not a sprint,“ says Chris de Koning, a spokesman for Shell Hydrogen. The corporations take a similarly long-term approach: “We have been in the energy business for 100 years,“ says de Koning. “We want to be in the energy business for at least another 100.“
Buses are the first step; after that come cars, and finally the country’s fishing fleet. In 2003 the ribbon was cut for the world’s first commercial hydrogen filling station, in Reykjavik. For now, its only customers are the three buses provided by Daimler-Chrysler, but when hydrogenpowered vehicles become more widely available, any driver will be able to simply pull in and use the pumps. INE is now in the midst of negotiations with vehicle manufacturers, with the goal of introducing the first hydrogen-powered cars by early 2006.
As they transport passengers around the city, white trails of pure steam floating behind them, the buses are constantly monitored to gather data on their efficiency, performance, and reliability; on the lifetime of their components; and on passenger satisfaction. “So far the project has been going extremely well,“ reports INE head Jon Bjorn Skulason. “The major components of the buses have not failed at all.“ The only significant challenge to date occurred when a pipe in the Reykjavik filling station ruptured, leading to a minor redesign.

The world is developing wind power. Here is an update from technologyreview.com Wind power, already the world’s fastest-growing source of electricity, is picking up still more momentum. The wind industry in Europe--the epicenter of wind power adoption--expects that one-quarter of the continent’s new electricity-generating capacity in the next decade will come from wind. To both spur and serve this demand, manufacturers are developing colossal new offshore wind turbines with blade spans that exceed the length of a football field--including the end zones.
Today’s largest commercial wind turbine has a blade span of 104 meters and produces up to 3.6 megawatts of electricity-- enough to power 1,000 average US households. But in February, Repower Systems of Germany switched on a demonstration turbine near Hamburg that produces five megawatts and has a blade span of 126 meters. And General Electric is developing a design for a 70-meter blade, which translates to a total blade span topping 140 meters. GE doesn’t yet have a timeline for building such a massive machine but believes a turbine of that size could produce as much as seven megawatts, says Jim Lyons, chief techðnologist at GE Wind, progress.org reported.
“The economics work better as the turbines get bigger--and the name of the game is economics,“ says Bob Thresher, director of the National Wind Technology Center, a federal lab in Boulder, CO. The goal of industry and federal researchers is to create wind farms that produce electricity for about three cents per kilowatt-hour, down from about 4.5 cents today; that would beat the cost of fuel for the most efficient new gas-fired power plants--currently about 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. If the development process goes well, Thresher says, these huge turbines should be ready for widespread wind farm use in 2012.
Still, relying on superbig machines is not without risk, notes John McGowan, a mechanical engineer and wind energy expert at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The bigger the turbines get, the higher the cost if one of them fails. “Sooner or later, they are going to make one too big,“ says McGowan, “and they are going to lose their shirt.“ And, he adds, efforts to develop turbines in the five- to seven-megawatt range are still too immature to yield reliable estimates of the cost of deploying them in wind farms.
The Progress Report interjects--we are expecting much smaller-scale wind turbines to be developed as well. Millions of private homes can have their own little high-tech windmills. And some entrepreneurs will grow rich while helping the world.
Global wind power capacity grew 20 percent last year, and power-grid operators are wrestling with ways to integrate that increased output into today’s transmission system. Bigger turbines churning out still more power would make solving that problem all the more critical. Wind farms’ productivity fluctuates with the weather, and that’s a challenge on the electrical grid, which must maintain a constant balance of supply and demand. Hydroelectric power, where available, can provide some stability. For example, last year Canadian Hydro Developers built a wind farm next to a hydroelectric plant in southern Alberta. Grid managers are also turning to advanced wind forecasts to help them plan ahead, tapping supplementary capacity or purchasing additional power as necessary.

The offshore cold water is certainly the largest source of alternate energy available to the state of Hawaii.

The turquoise blue waters surrounding Hawaii’s emerald green isles have long been a source of food and recreation. Now the chilly waters deep below the ocean’s surface are being eyed as a source of cool relief from the tropical heat.
Isolated in the middle of the Pacific, Hawaii’s energy industry depends heavily on the world’s finite supply of imported oil and coal.
So the state began to examine whether cold seawater could be harnessed to meet the islands’ year-round air conditioning needs.
“The offshore cold water is certainly the largest source of alternate energy available to the state of Hawaii. And you’re not going to run out of it“ said Reb Bellinger, vice president of sales and marketing for Makai Ocean Engineering Inc, according to enn.com.
The company has worked on a number of projects employing seawater cooling, including a system that opened in Toronto last year, and at this nation’s trailblazer--Cornell University. The technology has also been used in Stockholm, Sweden, since the 1990s.
A $100 million system proposed for downtown Honolulu could reach about 65 buildings, including several state office buildings, said David Rezachek, associate development director of Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning, which is working with Kailua-based Makai to put cold seawater technology to work in Hawaii.
Bills to help move the project along, including providing the company with special purpose revenue bonds, are being considered by Hawaii’s Legislature. Then it’s just a question of getting customers to sign up.
Once underground pipes leading from an ocean-side plant are in place beneath the city streets, buildings would be able to tap into the system and save about 75 percent of the electricity used by conventional cooling systems, said Rezachek.
The technology is relatively simple. Cold ocean water is pumped up to the plant through a closed system, cooling down fresh water in an adjacent system. That cold fresh water is then used by buildings to bring down the temperatures of their interiors, similar to a conventional air conditioning system.
The University of Hawaii has built a similar system using deep seawater wells for its new ocean-side medical school buildings near downtown Honolulu.
Cornell’s system, operating since 2000 at its Ithaca, N.Y., campus, draws cold water from Cayuga Lake and saves 86 percent of the power used by conventional air conditioning, said W.S. “Lanny“ Joyce, the project’s manager.
Conditions are particularly favorable in Hawaii where the sea floor plummets along with the water temperatures not too far offshore, less so in bodies of water such as the Gulf of Mexico, which is more shallow.
It was on Hawaii’s Big Island where one of the likely first examples of the concept was pieced together by a few sweltering scientists back in 1981.
During the 1980s, the Natural Energy Laboratory near the Kona Airport was the only place in the world to bring up cold water from a depth of 2000 feet with the intent of studying its usefulness as an energy source.
An aquaculture facility was also operating on the site out of an old sea shipping container, said Jan War, operations manager for the lab.
“What we did is we took an old truck radiator and ran cold seawater through and put a box fan behind it and air conditioned the van for a year with very little energy and cold seawater. ... Sort of the stone age approach to air conditioning but it showed us it could be done for very little investment,“ War said.
Four years later, the Natural Energy lab tested a seawater system on one of its larger labs and now uses the cold ocean water to cool three of its buildings--saving about $3,000 per month on its electricity bills, War said.
The technology is touted for using a renewable--and local--resource and saving potable water usually lost to evaporation in conventional systems.
And besides the environmental benefits, it should also save money on electricity bills--eventually.
“Everything in utilities is capital intensive. That’s the problem. But once people start to accept the inevitability of renewable energy there will be a greater and greater demand,“ said Bill Mahlum, chief operating officer of Minnesota-based Market Street Energy Co., Honolulu Seawater’s parent company.