Burning Water
How Burning Water Can Create Alternative Energy
Forget solar, wind, biofuels or even tidal & wave energy. It seems that burning water may be the solution to our energy needs! In the southern part of the Arctic Ocean, the very surface of the ocean is burning vigourously, with continual flames shooting dozens of feet into the air.
Unfortunately for those of us thinking that technological genius is about to snatch us out of an impending climate change crisis, burning water is no more attainable for us as our attempts at the perpetual burning bush. The plumes of flame that have been reported from the Arctic over the past few months are fed by methane gases escaping from the ocean floor as the water above that seabed warms and enables this potent gas to rise.
Methane has been venting from the ocean for millennia. It is a natural consequence of anaerobic digestion of the ocean’s organic materials that have fallen to the sea bed. However, the research of Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and her colleagues, who collected 5000 samples of seawater from the East Siberian Arctic shelf over a recent 5-year period, has raised considerable cause for concern. They have ascertained that, in over 100 hotspots where methane gas is leaking from the seabed permafrost, the concentrations of methane were more than eight times the normal.
What is even more troubling is that scientists believe that the increased release is due to a mere 1 degree increase in ocean current temperature, allowing the gas to escape from its permafrost prison. If the release is indeed caused by global warming, its potential implications for disaster are immense. According to calculations, the rate of release is about 7 million tonnes per year, or about 2% of overall methane release. If the rate continues to increase with each elevation of ocean current temperature, that 2% could triple or quadruple in a few decades.
Methane is one of the worst threats to our atmosphere – far worse than that posed by CO2. Consequently, a new urgency to discovering ways to “slow the flow” of warmer currents is needed. OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) holds promise for some reduction in ocean temperature increase. However, it focuses largely on tropical and subtropical regions, so the impact will be felt minimally during the early stages of OTEC deployment.
On the other hand, methane is a volatile fuel comparable to natural gas or propane. Can this methane be captured prior to release from the subfloor permafrost, or even captured as it rises in plumes from through the water? While the concept may seem to be science fiction, using the ocean to heat and cool millions of homes was, until recently, viewed as a futuristic dream.
Perhaps, with a little ingenuity, we actually will see the water of the deep as an energy source as rich as the natural gas veins of northwestern North America.
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