Power snow: A five-centimeter-wide nozzle head (top) sprays out a mixture of methane and water that forms snow-like methane hydrate.
Charles Taylor, NREL
A new transport method involving ice crystals could make it practical to get natural gas from remote areas, with no worries about explosions.
Storing and shipping natural gas by trapping it in ice--using technology being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy--could cut shipping costs for the fuel, making it easier for countries to buy natural gas from many different sources, and eventually leading to more stable supplies worldwide.
The DOE researchers say the approach could also be safer than current methods of shipping natural gas, such as cooling it to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG), since there is no danger that iced natural gas will explode if the shipping container is damaged.
The technology traps natural gas in the form of methane hydrate, in which methane, the main component of natural gas, is confined within cage-like ice crystals. Conventional technologies for making methane hydrate take hours or days: they involve mixing water and the hydrocarbon in large pressurized vessels. The new approach forces water and methane through a specially designed nozzle that creates the methane hydrate "almost instantaneously," says Charles Taylor, the lead researcher on the project at the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh. As the mixture exits the nozzle, it quickly forms hydrate, which looks like snow.
The challenge, Taylor says, was designing the nozzle to create precisely the right conditions for forming the methane hydrate immediately after the mixture of water and methane exits the nozzle. If the hydrate forms too soon, it clogs the nozzle. Although the approach has only been demonstrated at a small scale, it could prove cheaper than existing transportation methods, he says.
The difficulty and costs of transporting natural gas--it is either sent through pipelines or converted to LNG-- means many natural gas resources, particularly remote ones, are too expensive to access. Taylor says the new technology could help rescue some of these "stranded" resources--increasing worldwide supplies and allowing more countries to become producers.
The results of a methane hydrate demonstration project in Japan by Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding, a large maker of ships for transporting oil and natural gas, suggested that the total cost of transporting methane hydrate--including the infrastructure required to make it and release the gas at its destination--could be "much lower than that of LNG," according to the company. That demonstration used conventional methods for making methane hydrates, Taylor says. His new technology would make the approach even cheaper, he says, although the researchers haven't yet determined by how much.
A new estimate suggests there's 80 percent less gas than previously thought. That may still be plenty.
Not green at all, reports a study suggesting that the methane released by fracking and drilling makes it worse than coal.
if hydrates are cheaper and easier it will win an open competition
for new capacity. Hydrates can beat out liquified natural gas in if there is no increment in demand only if the total cost of moving natural gas as hydrates are lower than the operating costs of moving natural gas as a liquid using existing capacity.
If the total cost using hydrates is cheaper than the operating costs using liquid natural gas than the owners of existing of existing ships and liquification plants will scrap their ships and plants early.
Re: if hydrates are cheaper and easier it will win an open competition
I don't think that converting natural gas to natural gas hydrates for shipping purposes is cheaper than shipping it as LNG.
We should be focusing our attention on converting "stranded natural gas" into liquid hydrocarbon like gasoline. The current process of methane reforming and F-T catalysis is not yet optimized, and perhaps there are ways to lower the cost of generating liquid transportation fuels from "stranded natural gas."
It's hard to get excited about cheaper fossil fuels isn't it...
Too funny. It is easy when it has 100% less mercury, 99% less nitrous and 40% less sulfur than coal. It ain't perfect but with centuries of the stuff it's a good start and a great bridge fuel to whatever they figure out next (thorium, renews, etc).
So how much water does this take?
The article says "water" is mixed with gaseous methane in the nozzle. At
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/oil-gas/FutureSupply/MethaneHydrates/about-hydrates/chemistry.htm
they say, "A similar [specific] formula cannot be written for methane hydrate, the best we can do is XCH446H2O—with X being as much as eight, but usually less—and even this is not correct, as other guest gases may also be present."
So to capture less than eight CH4 molecules (weight <128) we are going to use 46 H2O molecules (weight 828)? And this is going to reduce transportation costs?
If it does, it shows how shockingly inefficient the LNG process is.
Next question - name a natural gas field that has a surplus of fresh water available! If the water could be reclaimed as potable, that might be a benefit at the receiving end, but until it becomes profitable to truck snow down from mountains in refrigerated shipping containers, this whole idea seems absurd.
Now if one could use saltwater, and it could be released at the receiving end as freshwater, you _might_ have a useful process.
It would be nice if this process could work with Hydrogen. You could stop by the the station and have a few ice cubes put in your car before going on a long drive.
this could be done already.
Water reacts spontaneously with aluminum to liberate hydrogen (explosively) in the presence of trace elements that prevent the formation of aluminum oxide on the surface of the aluminum.
So you could power your car with a tank of aluminum pellets and a few gallons of water. You'd feed the pellets a few at a time into a small reactor that would combine the two, releasing hydrogen for your car to burn in an internal combustion engine, or react in a fuel cell to produce electricity.
http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage7355.html
It isn't coincidence that aluminum metal powder is used as rocket fuel.
http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html
Magnesium also reacts with water to liberate hydrogen.
http://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/3498
In either case, the spent oxide would be recycled at your next fill-up station to be recycled (with energy added in this step) to the metal for the next car.
So there isn't alot of need for hydrogen ice. You simply store the hydrogen as water, which we have lots of.
Unfortunately most natural gas sources contain a small percentage of CO2 which when mixed with liquid water is corrosive to carbon steel pipe. This is why natural gas is deydrated prior to high pressure transport. LNG on the otherhand is perfectly dry - a much better way to go.
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eric25001
25 Comments
Under water frozen hydrates
Maybe the same technology could work under the water and pressure where the big deposites of frozen hydrates are? Why not hydrogen on the rocks? Increase cleaner energy suppy from vast deposits moves us towards energy independence.
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