Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:49:03 PM
We already know that Alaska has vast energy reserves of oil and natural
gas locked away in places that Congress dares not go — like the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, for instance. They also have a lot of snow
and ice, and as it turns out, they have energy reserves there
as well. Crystals known as hydrates buried in the permafrost of the
North Slope may contain enough energy to heat 100 million homes for a
decade, if extracted properly
If the hydrates can be extracted, it could provide another boom for
Alaska’s energy industry. The pending natural-gas pipeline could
transport the output from the hydrates just as it would for
conventional natural gas. In fact, Alaska may take a back seat to the
Gulf of Mexico, which also has a large amount of hydrates in cold-water
regions and which already has natural-gas infrastructure to transport
the final product.
Hydrates aren’t quite ready yet, however. The government has
partnered with oil companies to develop extraction processes, but they
have yet to test them. Researchers have to manufacture synthetic
hydrates for testing in order to avoid the highly potent natural
hydrates, which are by volume 164 times as powerful as natural gas.
Producers in Alaska would prefer to go after conventional natural-gas
deposits first, and environmentalists worry about the effect of mining
on the permafrost as well as the release of methane (a greenhouse gas)
into the atmosphere.
This seems to be very similar to oil shale in the natural-gas
context. We know that we have decades of energy potential, locked into
formations that we can’t quite access and which will be costlier than
resources already at hand. It’s worth researching, but we can afford
to go slow — as long as we can continue to access the conventional
deposits we know exist already.