So does the United States; the Department of Energy publishes a quarterly newsletter on the topic, called 'Fire in the Ice', available online in PDF format. The United States has poured well over a hundred million into exploring this technology, with another 90 million for the next two years. Japan and Canada have a joint testbed production facility in Canada which is supposed to provide a proof in concept of recovering methane hydrates from the permafrost, but that's not usually mentioned, as this doesn't fit within the environmentalists ideals and likely will demonstrate that it will take more energy to extract the methane than you get from the methane itself.
China didn't build a ship, they contracted with an exploration company which conducted the core samples; South Korea did, however, make a dedicated core testing ship, though the majority of it's use is for probing their offshore natural gas resources. Through publicly funded universities, NOAA, various government agencies, and cooperation from the US Navy, the claim could easily be made that we've more than twenty exploration ships in our 'national inventory.' When you count exploration ships owned by US companies or their subsidiaries, we've closer to seventy of them.
Total investment from public sources into seafloor methane hydrate research now exceeds two billion worldwide, and total amount of methane extracted is less than the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline. But there are thousands employed who depend upon it remaining in the hands of government investment, including three full time employees at the National Energy Technology Laboratory. The focus of their efforts have turned from harvesting and extracting methane hydrates to the.. This is hard to type with a straight face. Their present investigative efforts are in the possible release of methane hydrates into the global environment and the impact on the global carbon footprint. Also of concern is the impact on 'sensitive deep ocean environments.' Finally, the 'China Syndrome' of ocean floor based methane hydrate recovery - a deep sea slide causing a wide spread tsunami triggered by a cascade release of methane hydrates as a result of harvesting methane hydrates.
Yup, that's right, we're paying millions not to figure out how to get methane up from the seafloor, but how much of that methane might be 'spilled' into the environment and how it will impact the deep ocean floor where virtually nothing can ever survive.
This is why government subsidies are awful. We pay for one goal - develop the technology to get this ice based natural gas extracted and delivered for commercial use - and we get instead - build the opposition documents that will prevent this from ever being an economically viable source and create the documents that will be used by environmentalists to ban US companies from ever participating in it.
Hi Kingu,
You are certainly knowledgeable and I appreciate the updates and new info you have given me.
So much of this energy debate has centered on last years news, or even older questions that have long since been decided.
There are many kinds of subsidies and of course billions are wasted. I like the way my neighbors are doing it in Eddyville Iowa. There Indian Hills Community College is working directly with manufacturers large and small to develop new uses for corn and to train employees for working there. Of course it is a subsidy but perhaps closer linked to the real world than some.
I see that ag and chemical giant Monsanto is buying in now with their expertise and money. The big companies will dominate the ethanol production, but hundreds of small companies serving niche markets for hundreds of corn bi-products will spin off and some will make millionaires out of their owners, engineers and stock holders.
Many of these new business owners will come out of the subsidized research and training programs in the Indian Hills Community College, bolstered by their relationships, experiences and networking with the bigger companies.
We Conservative often have a knee jerk negative reaction to the word subsidy, but not all subsidies are bad or wasteful.
larry