And what we have in here is the ability to process and test

Methane in sea bed cores a potential new source of energy

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin are investigating extracting methane from cores drilled from the sea bed of the Gulf of Mexico. The University’s canada goose outlet new york city Jackson School of Geosciences canada goose outlet parka has a lab which maintains the cores’ low temperature and high pressure where canada goose outlet reviews they are occur naturally. This facility allows the canada goose outlet store uk methane to be carefully released and analysed. The methane occurs as methane hydrate. It is thought to be almost ubiquitous in ocean cores. canada goose outlet nyc But the quantities are still unknown. As Lab Director Peter Polito explains, the ideal situation would be for the cores to supply methane, with the drill sites then being a sink for the carbon dioxide produced when the methane is burnt. The efficiencies and practicalities of such a system have not yet been established.

Robyn Williams: We begin in Austin, Texas, in a shiny new lab and its director Peter canada goose outlet online uk Polito, with some good news, and a caution.

cheap Canada Goose Peter Polito: We are in the basement of the Jackson School of Geology building and what we are looking at is the goose outlet canada exterior of the pressure core centre. And so it’s these nice brand spanking new white aluminium walls filled with all sorts of electronic panels. But what’s so canada goose outlet online special is what’s behind those walls. And inside of this pressure core centre, or the PCC as we call it, is one of the only labs of its type in the United States. And what we have in here is the ability to process and test pressure cores. cheap Canada Goose

Canada Goose sale And a pressure core is a geologic sample canada goose outlet store that was collected at a high pressure environment, in our case at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and it is brought to the surface, scanned with X ray and CT imagery, it is blasted with all sorts of seismic waves, all while maintaining pressure and all at the temperature at which these samples are stable, which is refrigerator temperature. And then subsampled into 1.2 metre cores and shipped to Austin, all without ever losing pressure. Canada Goose sale

Canada Goose Parka The reason why that is so important is these samples have something called methane hydrate, and methane hydrate is an ice like substance, a single methane molecule encased in an ice lattice. The way official canada goose outlet I like to think about it is it’s like a ping pong ball of methane in a soccer ball of ice. Canada Goose Parka

Robyn Williams: And how much is down there in the Gulf of Mexico like that?

Peter Polito: canada goose outlet uk That is the canada goose outlet sale million dollar maybe billion dollar question. We know this is a pretty ubiquitous substance. It exists all over in the deep water oceans, it occurs in the permafrost at the northern latitudes. What we don’t know is how much is economically viable. Part of that is understanding what kind of deposits they are in. Sometimes you might have these really thick muds that have a little bit of methane everywhere, so overall the deposit is vast but really difficult to get. What we are canada goose outlet looking at are sandy lenses, and so canada goose outlet jackets relatively speaking this is like a very coarse material for the deep ocean. All of this space between the sand grains is filled to about 70% methane. And so what that equates to is a methane hydrate goldmine. Whether canada goose black friday sale or not it is, like I said, economically accessible at this point kind of remains to be seen.

buy canada goose jacket Robyn Williams: So you’re trying to find out by letting it evaporate or what? buy canada goose jacket

Peter Polito: So what we do is we’ve drilled down these cores, and so we went out to the Gulf of Mexico for two and a half weeks this past April and canada goose factory outlet May, and we, in a little over a mile of water, 7,000 feet of water and then another 1,400, 1,500 feet of sediment, we extracted these cores, brought onto the surface of the vessel, sampled them and shipped them here. And so now we have in this room where we will go into in a minute, we have 21 pressure cores with methane hydrate bearing sediment. And we need to understand that the hydrate’s geo mechanical properties, what happens when you squish it, pull it, tear it, et cetera, we want to know just how much is in there, and so we want to take a https://www.canadagooseisverige.com survey of how much hydrate by percentage is in these deposits. We will slowly bleed off that pressure and collect all of the methane and actually measure it volumetrically, and then come back and say deposits in this region in the Gulf of Mexico with this sort of grain size distribution have 80% hydrate. You can’t go out and drill a hole every square foot of the Gulf of Mexico, it’s a little impractical.

uk canada goose outlet Robyn Williams: Has there been any other place where they found out it’s exploitable, that you can in fact invest in taking the methane out? uk canada goose outlet

Canada Goose Jackets Peter Polito: That’s a great question. So in the United States, no, but that’s not because it’s not present, the reason is we don’t need it. We have these shale gas plays on the continental US, on land, and so they are much more economically viable. However, gas hungry canada goose outlet uk sale countries such as Korea, Japan and China, they are running a much more elaborate test where they are producing for days to weeks at a time to assess whether or not it is economically viable. And we don’t know exactly how well they did. According to the press it was phenomenal. But the reality is those countries need those deposits, and so they are willing to pay a higher price than here in the US where we don’t need it. What we want to know is 10, 20, 30 years from now, is this going to be economically viable. So we are funded by the Department of Energy and I think, speaking for myself, their question is, okay, down the road is this going to be viable? And we want to do our homework now, so down the road we know, instead of having to then try and figure out when there’s a gas crisis. Canada Goose Jackets

cheap canada goose uk Robyn Williams: Shall we go inside? cheap canada goose uk

Peter Polito: Sure. Do you want a jacket or anything?

Robyn Williams: Why, is it very cold?

canada goose Peter Polito: It’s about 6C, so it’s chilly. We’ll stay as long as you can handle it, how about that? canada goose

canadian goose jacket Robyn Williams: There’s a challenge, okay. These great big doors are about to open. canadian goose jacket

canada goose store Peter Polito: I’ll get you to wear safety glasses. canada goose store

Canada Goose Online Robyn Williams: Safety glasses, okay. Now I look like Austin Powers. Yes, it’s endurable. You’ve got some shiny instruments here. Where’s the core? Canada Goose Online

canada goose uk black friday Peter Polito: So over here we have 21 vertically aligned cylinders, they are dull grey with these really big ball valves on the bottom, and in each of these 21 vessels we have a sample that ranges anywhere from tens of centimetres up to 1.2 metres. So all told we brought back about 22 metres of core, which was a big success for us. canada goose uk black friday

uk canada goose Robyn Williams: And slowly they are being analysed. Any results so far? uk canada goose

Peter Polito: So far what we have identified is that these deposits have very high methane hydrate saturations, inter bedded with very low hydrate saturations. We also learned that we have really high saturations in reservoirs with much finer canada goose outlet canada grains than we expected. We thought we would get may be 50%, 60% saturation in kind of a sandbox sand type deposit. These are actually much, much finer, and so they would actually be classified as a sandy silt, which in layman’s terms means it’s a little bit of coarse staff and a lot of fine stuff.

Robyn Williams: Any use to you?

canada goose uk outlet Peter Polito: Very much. So what this means is that there could potentially be more economically viable deposits down the road. But these early results, and I have to stress these are early and preliminary, that we may actually be able to get hydrate out of much finer deposits, and there’s a lot more of those than there are strictly coarse deposits. canada goose uk outlet

Robyn Williams: And as they are lying there, presumably they are left over from life that had canada goose outlet shop lived somewhere and sank to the bottom, and in the usual way natural gas as it’s called, or methane, is produced?

Peter Polito: That’s actually really I find one of the most interesting questions and something we are looking at. And so we can run an analysis of the gas to figure out if it is thermogenic or biogenic. And if it’s thermogenic, that means it is produced at a particular temperature and basically cooked animal parts, as you say. If it’s biogenic it is formed by microbes in the surrounding material. And what we found is in this particular deposit it is mostly from the microbes immediately nearby. So these deposits are not dependent on organisms that live millions of years ago that died, buried, and have been heated, cooked and turned into gas. These are actually formed probably relatively nearby.

canada goose coats Robyn Williams: So the result is if you can work out that a particular deposit is useful and productive and extensive, you can say, okay, this is where you can drill and this is where other countries can go for whatever their canada goose outlet deposits happen to represent. canada goose coats

Peter Polito: Yes, and this is really, really important. I mentioned Japan, Korea and China as these countries that need that source of natural gas. If this is as ubiquitous as we think, canada goose jacket outlet this may be a great resource for maybe energy poor countries. I am thinking along any coastal margins, so that is all of Southeast Asia, India, Africa, South canada goose outlet toronto factory America. This could be a source of energy for a lot of countries that have to rely on other sources for their energy and outside of their own country. And as we know, any time you get into these big geopolitical issues, problems can arise. And it may not be reliable long term, but if you are a country, say, in South Africa, and you have a coast and you’ve got these deposits, then you may actually have energy security for the first time in your nation’s history, which would be really exciting for the world.

Canada Goose Outlet Robyn Williams: Two questions finally, one canada goose outlet black friday of them about the permafrost you mentioned. If the permafrost melts, as is predicted, over the vast areas of Siberia, the tundra and northern Canada, and it releases methane, what will happen Canada Goose Outlet.