Study Finds Methane Leaks Negate Benefits of Natural Gas-Powered Vehicles 102
Lasrick writes "Coral Davenport at the NY Times reports on a study to be published on Friday: '...a surprising new report...concludes that switching buses and trucks from traditional diesel fuel to natural gas could actually harm the planet's climate.' The report apparently documents that the leaks of methane that occur when drilling for natural gas more than make up for the climate change benefits of using natural gas as a transportation fuel. The report will be published Friday in the journal Science."
Manipulative headline (Score:5, Insightful)
The title implies that we should abandon gas as an alternative to diesel/petrol.
This is done by falsely implying that pollution due to methane leaks are an inherit part of the drilling process.
Instead, what we should really do is improve the drilling techniques to avoid/minimize leakage.
Re:Manipulative headline (Score:5, Interesting)
So more a message of "take care" instead of "abandon".
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Drilling is but one small part of the well's lifetime, and there are many opportunities for loss of methane during the service of wells and delivery of product.
That said, you have to get your energy from one dirty source or another. Methane is much less toxic than burning black coal, and I re-peat, burning lignite is re-tarded.
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Yeah, but that's almost like saying that the leaks can be prevented by coating the pipes in unicorn sharts.
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That would be true, if oil and gas companies were capable of "taking care". Given that they don't give a shit if thousands of people get sick or die as a result of their drilling, there's not much hope of that.
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Unless that's more expensive than finding greener power sources.
Like "lawyer combustion" or "woman's scorn"
Re:Manipulative headline (Score:4, Funny)
Ooooh, if all our cars were powered by Woman's Scorn they would be quick like Lambos and sound even meaner!
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Ooooh, if all our cars were powered by Woman's Scorn they would be quick like Lambos and sound even meaner!
And they'd be much better for the environment because we'd all drive less. Can you imagine if every time you stepped on the accelerator you heard, "ARE YOU EVEN LISTEN TO ME!" I'd walk or bike to anything less than 100 miles.
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That would make a good engine noise for an electric car.
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Natural gas if scaled up is a transition fuel at best, it will peak out in
about 50 years unless they figure out to hook up all the sewer systems
and agri waste in the world via something akin to a digester.
http://strausfamilycreamery.co... [strausfamilycreamery.com]
I think if all cars on earth ran on natural gas it would be a short run indeed.
Alot of the oil and gas crowd are looking at natural gas as a transition
for their declining oil output globally.
When you see Saudi drilling offshore it should be wake up call the
the easier and ch
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Declining oil output globally? Citation needed, peak oil boy.
For now, production continues to increase. Crow will soon have to be eaten. By rights it should already be cold leftover crow.
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Everyone knows we hit peak oil in the 1970s. That's why we have to walk everywhere, and those antique internal combustion vehicles are cluttering our landfills.
Re:Manipulative headline (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Manipulative headline (Score:5, Informative)
Part of what you say is true, however
Fracking occurs MILES below any aquifers, and the bore is very well sealed
is only potentially a true statement. Yes, if it's done right, the well bore is sealed and there is very little chance of contamination through the bore. However, cementing a well (the process that seals it) is not a trivial task (cf, the Macando disaster). It can be done correctly or not. The testing isn't easy and there is always going to be the temptation to just call it OK and go with the cement job.
If you don't have processes in place to supervise the drilling company (like, for example, Pennsylvania) you're going to end up with contaminated well bores. Most of the time a small leak won't do anything untoward - at least not right away. But left in place for a couple of years you can get significant migration of petrochemicals at very shallow depths.
Same issue with capping a well once it's finished producing - you can do it cheaply or you can do it correctly.
What needs to happen is for the 'non traditional' petrochemical producing states to create and administrative structure like the Texas Railroad Commission (dumb, historical name) with regulatory powers and significant legal teeth to ensure that things are done correctly. Seems like a no brainer - it's self funding and Texas has a long track record of creating a really high level of well control without undue fuss. That doesn't seem to have happened. I'm sure drilling companies would love to NOT be adequately supervised but we all know how well that works out.
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Explain why some oil companies are trucking in water to ppl who have had their water
wells ruined by fracking fluids.
Are you one of the paid corporate bloggers, or one of the ones for the government that
helped make the Halliburton Loophole ? So they could legally hide 8 of the ingredients
that are toxic sludge that causes cancer and organ failure.
http://www.independentwatertes... [independen...esting.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11... [nytimes.com]
http://www.earthworksaction.or... [earthworksaction.org]
So when it comes to lying plutocrats puppetteering the government
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Bullshit. (Score:2)
Plus methanes half life is only about 10 years ... (Score:5, Informative)
... in out atmosphere , whereas the CO2 released from burning it hangs around for hundreds if not thousands of years until its reabsorbed.
(And yes I am aware that the escaped methane ends up as CO2 after those 10 odd years , but its a tiny amount compared to the amount we release by burning).
Short lived greenhouse gases help persuade (Score:1)
If people let enough methane escape to change the climate, it would be a short term disaster and teaching opportunity. It seems better than releasing enough CO2 to get the same change in temperature, because with CO2 the the effect would last so much longer.
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If people let enough methane escape to change the climate, it would be a short term disaster and teaching opportunity. It seems better than releasing enough CO2 to get the same change in temperature, because with CO2 the the effect would last so much longer.
If we limited reproduction of humans or wiped a 3rd world country off the planet we'd also significantly reduce CO2 being released as well. We're creating the problem by just living which is far worse than oil companies do. Also temperature change? Have you looked at the weather lately? Global Warming is in full effect here in Minnesota.
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Quibble: Ten years is the mean lifetime of methane in the atmosphere. The half-life is even less, about seven years.
The major sink is reaction with hydroxyl (OH-) radicals in the upper atmosphere. The second biggest sink is consumption by soil bacteria.
More info here [wikipedia.org].
Re:Manipulative headline (Score:4, Insightful)
No. In order to say that, we need to know how feasible it is to reduce leakage. It's by no means certain it's easy or even possible.
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Mod parent Insightful.
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Underneath it also implies fracking is like a giant fart.
Re:Manipulative headline (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm oddly getting rather pissed at the manipulative headlines, followed by the "well it's bad anyway, we should simply not do it at all" mentality that seems to be permeating from environmentalist, but also academia. Now maybe I'm off in the wild, but it sure seems like their only solution is the dark ages, with 1/3 or less the number of humans. Because "it's the only way."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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and just do what it takes to make fission...
We already did that. The problems with nuclear power are problems of emotion and education, not technology. Yet it's the most opposed form of generation out there.
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Or, you know, get a little perspective
Odd, I thought I had plenty of perspective. After all, if what you said was true then environmentalists wouldn't throw a hissyfit over nuclear power, or even waste to energy facilities. But they do, and they do so in a very hard way. Many of them simply don't "want" them at all, just like they don't want coal/oil/NG/etc power plants. Hell, I've even seen them against methane reclamation from cow and pig shit.
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Your lack of perspective is due to the fact that you can't tell the difference between environmentalists and hippie nutjobs. That's as bad as thinking every Republican is Rush Limbaugh.
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Your lack of perspective is due to the fact that you can't tell the difference between environmentalists and hippie nutjobs. That's as bad as thinking every Republican is Rush Limbaugh.
I live in Ontario, in turn there's this city called Toronto. Which believes that it's the centre of the universe much like California. There is no difference between environmentalists and hippie nutjobs.
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In short you seem to have built a private compound vision of some "normal environmentalist" that really doesn't make much sense. "They" are against everything as you have heard that some person is against something and then they have to be against everything else too, right?
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Nuclear would work if greed didn't override common sense and safety.
Unfortunately humans still are brainwashed that ink on paper is worth
more then the entire biosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If I was going to do nuclear I'd give more consideration to the Thorium LFTR
method mentioned in the google tech talk a few years ago.
Google "LFTR remix".
They like to talk about the huge increase in cancer that is coming among poor ppl
specifically, they don't like to show the science as to why.
Eating anything o
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A couple of hundred more years of this won't mean jack squat for quality and longevity of life -- indeed, rising seas may be a pain in the ass, but as long as the economy remains strong, and invention continues apace, you're better off in 200 years with 30 foot higher seas and an extra fifty years' worth of medical tech than low seas and a slower economy and medical tech 50 years behind where it otherwise would be.
Eould you rather out ancestors in 1850 slam the brakes on burning and their economy, leaving u
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1970, only a North Korea-like economy would advance 20 years in 150. Which is the point -- time and again advancement correlates to economic freedom.
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Or perhaps the combination of rising population and mass migrations of humans due to abrupt climate change might create orders of magnitude more problems than you are thinking about. We can't do anything short term about the population. We presumably can do something about climate change, although I doubt we actually will be able to slow things down given the political and economic and quite possibly physical barriers ahead of us.
Might not be the rather benign situation you're envisioning.
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Re:Manipulative headline (Score:4, Interesting)
The energy problem has been solved in several ways, they are all being held back
by ppl who are getting rich off the current paradigm.
Our current situation is largely due to ppl protecting their goose that lays the golden eggs.
1) Geothermal - could power the world many times over
2) Solar Thermal - could power the world many times over ( molten salt for energy storage )
3) Wind - could power the world ( molten salt for energy storage )
4) Ocean currents - could power the world many times over ( google Aquanator )
5) Biological Hydrogen - could power the world many times over ( Indirect solar )
6) Algae oil - ( indirect solar ) ( working prototypes at valcent technologies )
7) Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors ( can't make nuclear weapons with it, it can burn up the old waste in Yucca mountain )
We don't have an energy problem, we have a management problem.
The current "management" are puppets of the plutocrats and that is why we are screwed.
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I don't know where you got 1/3rd the humans, the foaming neo-malthusians want
90% of humans to shuffle off this mortal coil, and they took the time to stand
on a podium and scream and carve it in stone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
These ppl give zero consideration to things like vertical hydroponics, biological
hydrogen, geothermal binary cycle power, etc etc....
I think the main reason is because they are Eugenics pseudo science nut jobs just like Hitler.
As earth is about t
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"The title implies that we should abandon gas as an alternative to diesel/petrol."
An heating our homes an firing our industries.
The part that vehicles use is negligible.
The article stinks. At least there are no shaky videos.
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The title implies that we should abandon gas as an alternative to diesel/petrol.
This is done by falsely implying that pollution due to methane leaks are an inherit part of the drilling process.
Also, the title implies that it is the use of natural gas in vehicles that is the issue, when it's really about the drilling, which would be required regardless of the end use of the gas
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That and we need to outlaw tundra, swamps, and flatulent animals
as they make methane too.
Also to just save time and group it in one large lump we could
outlaw common sense too, lol.
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The title implies that we should abandon gas as an alternative to diesel/petrol.
This is done by falsely implying that pollution due to methane leaks are an inherit part of the drilling process.
Instead, what we should really do is improve the drilling techniques to avoid/minimize leakage.
except that is nearly impossible, since we are actively making the area more porous with fracking in the first place. Even if we could perfect sealing the well casings(5%+ fail immediately) we'd have to account for each sites geology the costs to seal the possible impact of an entire site would be completely cost prohibitive. I think people might start asking harder question once drilling companies started laying down gas impermeable membranes across the countryside, instead of just polluting it.
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As opposed to other pollution, I would think this has the nice advantage that it is in the drilling companies interest to reduce it (since what they are leaking is the product they want to sell!). It is true that they will not naturally stop leaks where the cost of stopping the leak is greater than the savings in product, but it sure sounds like a mild bit of regulation can fix this (and the company does get any methane they save, thus offsetting some of the cost of the regulation). In any case this sure se
Right! Just need petro corps to use best practice! (Score:1)
Along those lines... (Score:3)
Re:Along those lines... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm expecting a report any time now regarding hydrogen-fueled vehicles, and leaks of hydrogen..
look no further [stanford.edu], though it is largely positive compared to the alternatives of natural gas and petroleum.
Re: Along those lines... (Score:2)
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We have a solution to that: it's called "rain."
The problem with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is not the water vapor they produce; it's capturing and storing the hydrogen. Of course, one really easy way to store hydrogen is by chemically combining it with carbon, but if you do that then you might as well react it by combustion instead of (whatever the opposite of electrolysis is called) and then -- oops! -- you're back to the conventional driv
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Mars lost its atmosphere when it lost its magnetic field.
The earth's magnetic field is in decline, and will flip likely in the
not too distant future.
During the flip the "Aurora" will likely be seen over most of the earth.
More info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Being able to populate the planet with 8 billion people that are all able to travel at greater than walking speed is bound to have an impact.
You can bet your booty that if we invented a way to power our vehicles with unicorn farts, in some way the release of so many unicorn farts would, yet again, harm the environment.
Basically it's not about having no impact but about distributing and minimizing it.
By the way, what exactly is the thought behind replacing one fossil fuel with another?
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Simple chemical considerations show that methane emits 1.2 moles of CO2 per MJ generated, while coal emits 2.0 moles per MJ [wou.edu]. There's nothing "alleged" about the scientific fact that burning gas to produce energy is cleaner than burning coal to produce energy, and the ratio is large enough that you'd have to leak more gas than you collect in order for coal to become cleaner. And that's assuming "clean" black coal, not the brown coal that's typically burned in large quantities around the world.
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Because coal is so dirty that practically ANYTHING is "clean" in comparison.
Is drilling the cause? (Score:3)
The study concludes that there is already about 50 percent more methane in the atmosphere than previously estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency, a signal that more methane is leaking from the natural gas production chain than previously thought.
So the EPA just came up with a guess, and now that they're wrong they blame it on leaky pipes? Methane is produced by many other sources besides drilling, including natural plant growth. Considering how poorly the CO2 alarmist models have matched actual global temperatures, the EPA definitely needs to study and understand the cause prior to enacting more regulations that will jack up my heating bill even further.
And no leaks whatsoever when drilling for oil?? (Score:1)
So natural gas is only used for transportation? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article places blame on natural gas drilling and production for methane leaks, saying it negates the emissions advantages of using it as a transportation fuel.
So we only use it as a transportation fuel, and abiding the wisdom of this study we will stop producing it, since it isn't used for heating homes, as an industrial fuel or used in power plants?
I would guess that vehicle fueling is the smallest category of use of natural gas and even if we abandoned it totally as a vehicle fuel it would not change the amount of natural gas produced. So going back to diesel in all the vehicles that now use it would be a net gain in greenhouse gas production, since there would be almost no change in methane leaks from gas production.
Are we doomed? (Score:2)
Does anyone get the impression that our civilization is doomed? Short of finding a way of making practical nuclear fusion reactors work, something that has been always "30 years from now" since the time I was in middle school forty years ago, there seems to be no solution to our future energy needs that don't do evil things to our planet's climate that eventually will doom our civilization. So, in my mind, there are three alternatives: mass suicide, going off the grid and reverting to the behavior of our
Re:Are we doomed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone get the impression that our civilization is doomed? Short of finding a way of making practical nuclear fusion reactors work, something that has been always "30 years from now" since the time I was in middle school forty years ago, there seems to be no solution to our future energy needs that don't do evil things to our planet's climate that eventually will doom our civilization.
You are 100% correct no matter what the source of energy. The course we are on is unsustainable at our current rate of energy consumption. Tom Murphy's excellent essay "Galactic-Scale Energy [ucsd.edu]" made the case rather well (and it deserves its own Slashdot entry if it hasn't already had one -- I'm too lazy too look it up). About 1400 years from now (which is less time into the future than we are from the fall of the Roman Empire) we will be using more energy than is currently produced by the entirety of the sun if we don't back off on the growth of our energy consumption, which is showing no signs of easing up. It doesn't matter if the source of the energy is fossil fuels, nuclear fusion, or some future magic, the earth cannot host that amount of energy consumption. The planet will have reached its thermodynamic limit long before then.
Re: Are we doomed? (Score:2)
Let's be reasonable here... you are extrapolating 1400 years into the future based on a few decades of high human population growth, which is already curtailing.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
https://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
Also, compare with this [wikipedia.org] (which I seem to be posting a lot today, between this and the "Star Trek Economics" article).
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The course we are on is unsustainable at our current rate of energy consumption. Tom Murphy's excellent essay "Galactic-Scale Energy [ucsd.edu]" made the case rather well (and it deserves its own Slashdot entry if it hasn't already had one -- I'm too lazy too look it up). About 1400 years from now (which is less time into the future than we are from the fall of the Roman Empire) we will be using more energy than is currently produced by the entirety of the sun if we don't back off on the growth of our energy consumption, which is showing no signs of easing up.
This is completely false. US energy consumption per capital has actually fallen in recent years, and is currently no higher per capita than it was in 1970 [google.com]. Other developed countries have a similar trend.
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I think you're right but I think the principal problem is population growth.
It seems to me that most of our problems are driven by the excess billions of people we support.
There are a fair number of people who advocate a more off the grid approach, with a lot of emphasis on localized, smaller scale agriculture and light industry.
Basically you spend half your time on small-scale agriculture and the rest on local light industry. This removes a lot of the transportation and mass production for a consumer econ
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The downside is you live like it's 1850, and I'm not sure how readily I'm willing to give up modern medicine.
Not just modern medicine, virtually all modern industry would go away with that commune approach. You won't have steel, aluminum, carbon fiber, most rubber, most electronics, batteries, particle accelerators, the internet, etc. The list goes on and on. I'm pretty sure there are not many of people who really desire that life.
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I don't know that I consider myself an advocate for that kind of socio-economic restructuring, but as I understand the arguments, there's some kind of hand-waving arguments that argue that when you eliminate a lot of mechanized transport you eliminate most demand/need for many "advanced" materials like carbon fiber.
There's also some arguments made that some kinds of concentrated economic activity and trade will still happen, just on a much smaller scale to due to reduced demand.
I don't really buy it much, b
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There are 3 different fields of problems that could doom our civilization: Energy, Economic, Population Growth.
The energy problems are actually the smallest. I don't want to take a "don't worry, the future will solve it" attitude because that's incredibly irresponsible, but I think we're on a path to solving global warming by accident. Solar cells are getting cheaper and more efficient, electric cars are looking better every day, fossil fuels are getting more expensive and it's getting harder to socialize t
Re:Are we doomed? (Score:4, Informative)
People have been selling the idea that our civilization is doomed for centuries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
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No, I get the impression that there are a lot of people making a living by peddling the impression that our civilization is doomed.
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To be honest we don't even need to drill, we can grow oil with sunlight,
same for hydrogen.
Valcent managed 100,000 gal/acre/yr in the desert.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Clean means no particulates (Score:4, Informative)
Media picks up minor detail to play gotcha! (Score:4, Interesting)
This wonderful research was brought to you by: (source) [nytimes.com] The study, conducted by the University of Texas and sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and nine petroleum companies,. Main idea there was the gas leaks from fracking sites is more than estimated by EPA but much less than environmental groups.
One of the minor finding of this research was, compared to liquid hydrocarbons, the gaseous hydrocarbon burns cleanly and produces less carbon dioxide, but leaks more in the present day (paraphrased and emphasis by me) infrastructure. One would think the right thing to do is to plug the damned leaks, especially because the leakers are distributed according to power rule. (nothing to do with political power, power rule is a statistical term). Like 80% of crime committed by 20% of criminals, or 80% income earned by 20% of the employed, 80% of the leaks come from 20% of the leakers and 1% of the leakers basically account for 50% of all leaks. So it would be very cost effective to go after the leaks, plug it and make natural gas better than liquids as transportation fuel.
The immobile consumers of energy (offices, homes, factories) have alternatives to fossil fuels to varying degrees, mostly in the form of renewable electricity. But the transportation sector (except of electrified rail) relies totally on fossil fuels. Planes burn kerosene, no alternatives in sight. Trucks burn diesel some vague alternatives for delivery loops on the horizon, none for long distance haulers, yet. Diesel locomotives drag a long chain of LPG , CNG rail cars, but don't have the ability to use one of them as the fuel tank. But if the natural gas prices keep dropping, we can expect them to take a look. The railroads phased out all the steam locomotives and switched diesel in just one decade in 1950s. Cars have some alternatives within striking distance. No alternatives to fossil fules in sea cargo side either. The dependency of transportation sector on fossil fuels is not likely to be shaken for considerable future. Taking the effort to plug the leaks and switching to gaseous hydrocarbons instead of liquid hydrocarbons is the most viable thing to do to tackle climate change.
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Strictly speaking, if you wanted to go to an all-methane economy, you could do it. Planes, trains, and trucks would all be fueled using liquid methane. It's cold and harder to handle than diesel/kerosene, but it's doable.
The reason you would make the switch is because you can create methane synthetically via electrolysis and Sabatier reaction. The ultimate energy source would be solar or nuclear.
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I think the ultimate energy source is seen in the Casimir Effect, but our
science budget would have to be scaled up to 10% of what we spend
on military, lol.
Maybe we could close 10% of the 700+ baes in 100+ countries ??? ROFL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
http://physicsworld.com/cws/ar... [physicsworld.com]
Quantum mechanics is not a panacea. (Score:2)
Water water everywhere.... (Score:2)
but not a drop to burn???..... Its such a HHO.....
Ars Technica has a very good treatment on this (Score:2)
They look at this article, as well as various responses to it. The overall tone is even and reasonable. There is a bit of sensationalism to TFA, and some of its claims appear to be taking worst-case situations and generalizing them to the entire population of wells, etc.
It seems... (Score:2)
Methane degrades over time (Score:2)
The article does not mention at all that methane breaks down in the atmosphere after about 9.6 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Removal_processes), and creates needed water vapor in the upper atmosphere. Carbon dioxide does not react with anything in the atmosphere on it's own. Hence, methane is preferable in the long term.
Unjustified assumption (Score:2)