Wait. Am I getting this right? They want to inject high-pressure steam and chemicals into a massive underground natural gas reservoir. Then set off a big fire + explosion.
Surely, nothing can go wrong.
It’s called in situ combustion and apparently it’s a well established practice in the petroleum industry: https://glossary.slb.com/en/terms/i/in-situ_combustion
So is coal extraction. How long has that coal fire burned under that town? 60 years?
You can read all about the Centralia mine fire here. ISC for oil extraction, as referenced by the paper, is not applicable to coal mining.
First of all, they spelled Heelys wrong. Second, Heelys are a great idea, even better as an adult in an office with polished concrete floors
So heely wheels deliberately pluralize wrong?
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The alternatives are the status quo or severely restricting natural gas extraction. I won’t say the latter isn’t doable, especially if we can ramp up nuclear power capacity, but there’s a lot of baggage there. We should welcome a solution that effectively makes natural gas an emissions-free resource.
I won’t say the latter isn’t doable, especially if we can ramp up nuclear power capacity
We could do both and hedge our bets.
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I don’t understand what you mean. As described in the article, the process leaves the CO trapped in the ground.
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Not sure what direction to point you in. Gas storage in geological formations has been successfully practiced in the helium and natural gas industries for a while. Subterranean storage of carbon dioxide has also been successfully demonstrated. Apparently, there’s a big gas field being used for this purpose off the coast of Norway since 1996.
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Also, its probably safe to assume the producers will lie about how much they’re allowing to leak into the air.
You’re cheating by using trends to predict this. :-p
What could possibly go wrong?
This worst case scenario is probably the same as with any reservoir of natural gas (a massive leak and explosion), which is all the more reason to convert it to hydrogen and sequester the weaker, non-flammable GHG byproduct in situ.
I’d be worried about the now excess co2 levels disrupting the normal saturation levels in the groundwater.
Sparkling water, on tap!
It’s what plants crave I guess.
I imagine that suddenly all the co2 stored as gas underground could suddenly come out and being odorless, kills the whole neighboring town
I mean, all that methane coming out would probably be at least as bad, and the cavity had previously been filled with methane.
It’ll be a cavern deep under a lot of rock. If it can contain methane for zillions of years, I imagine that it can contain carbon dioxide.
Yes because igniting fires underground is a GREAT idea!
Centralia,PA would like a word…
Fuck hydrogen. Its a fake green product so oil companies can transition as slow as they want while still keeping their strangle hold on our society.
It depends a lot on where the hydrogen is sourced from. Hydrogen that is generated from electrolyzers using renewable power is completely green (and funny enough, called Green Hydrogen), and is a good way to store excess energy from solar and wind.
Oil companies however want to market hydrogen from drilling and refining, which is dirty as hell.
It’s an important differentiation to make though. Hydrogen is not inherently bad and will have plenty of green applications. We just have to make sure it’s coming from the right places.
and is a good way to store excess energy from solar and wind.
Is it really that good of a storage method, though? The round-trip efficiency is quite bad when compared to other methods of storage.
“That good of a storage method” in terms of what, arbitrage? We should be producing hydrogen for the practical and environmental benefits of having emissions-free vehicle fuel (that avoids the problems of battery production and disposal), steel, and fertilizer.
I don’t see any good reason why the merits of hydrogen for vehicle fuel would be any better than production and disposal of batteries. The other cases I agree that hydrogen will have a useful niche.
We’ll need it anyway to produce existing chemical materials sustainably. It may not be the best energy carrier nor most efficient, but it shines in specific applications. Vehicles are a promising example.
Sadly almost all hydrogen currently making its way to market is dirty. I have high hopes for it in the future but it seems like thinly veiled poison at the moment.
And this article is definitely about the dirty kind or at least feels like it is.
There’s companies working on it!
We’re just brokeAnd yes, this is definitely the dirty kind. It may still be an improvement on using natural gas directly, but there would need to be a fairly comprehensive analysis to tell for sure. One possible advantage though is we could start building up a hydrogen infrastructure that we can then feed green hydrogen into and completely replace the dirty hydrogen.
Anyway though, you’re right to be skeptical. It’s important though to look into the details to determine if it’s legitimately green energy or if it’s just oil companies greenwashing. We need to shun the latter while we promote the former.
(There is a grey area, and it’s the same as electric cars – if we’re using electricity from the grid to power cars, and electrolyzers which make hydrogen, is it truly green? I would say this is acceptable for the same reason EVs are acceptable. It’ll become completely emission free once the grid is run on renewables.)
I disagree. We need hydrogen for GHG-free fertilizer and steel production and it’s the superior choice for powering vehicles. Regardless, this research is interesting because it could help solve the natural gas problem.
Hydrogen from gas fields is anything but GHG-free!
Massive green hydrogen plants running on renewables now being built in Australia but hey keep being part of the problem instead of the solution.
That’s why processes that capture or avoid the GHG component of hydrogen production are worth investigating.
Ok, but what about the ecosystems dependent on that chemical energy staying underground?
Are you implying that there are subterranean ecosystems somehow dependent on natural gas deposits that are harmed by the exploitation of these resources?
These ecosystems are well studied.
This isn’t controversial in the slightest. We are destroying unique ecosystems with every barrel we extract.
That’s fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I guess these specific bacterial ecosystems would suffer, so to speak. Perhaps there should be rules to prevent oil and gas deposits from being completely depleted, or some could be set aside as nature preserves.
Yeah, something about this screams at me it’s not right.
Why wouldn’t this work? What would go wrong?
We’re about to make Fracking look like a great idea 😂
