Madmen, methane, and me

Madmen, methane and me

by Len Parker

There is an obvious irony and even hypocrisy in the fact that, while I worry about the impact of peak oil, climate change and global warming – and contemplate a possible 'perfect storm' with the eventual collapse of capitalism - I still drive a car on which I have a sticker: “Stop deep sea oil drilling.”

However, most people will agree, getting around a city the size of Auckland, picking people up and carrying materials without a car is a bit of a bummer with our present public transport system.

While it would seem the debate amongst most scientists is over regarding the human influence on global warming, there are still those who are yet to be convinced or are in denial. They will revolt only when we can no longer afford fuel to get to work (if they still have jobs). Equally as cynical, the little known Bolivian accords are more likely to take climate change more seriously and deliver more action than the current talk-fest Rio conference will.

Nevertheless, in this energy drive economy, the common understanding among most geophysicists and geologists is that the arrival of peak oil - oil that is easily accessible - is here and an undeniable reality, while the discovery of new sources has fallen behind demand. There are, however, vast quantities of less accessible hydrocarbons in rocks deep in the earth, and in the oil shales in Canada and elsewhere.

Very angry grizzly bears in Canada will tell you about the damage being done to their habitat as trucks fifty feet high and forty feet wide - the biggest in the world - deliver the mined shale to conveyor belts for processing, using vast amounts of energy to do so.

There are also enormous quantities of frozen methane (a potential alternative hydro-carbon fuel) buried in the permafrost in Siberia, and now bubbling up from the melting tundra. There is an even greater quantity (thousands of gigatonnes, as much as all the rest of the traditional fossil fuel deposits) in frozen water molecules deep in the rocks and sediment beneath the world's ocean floor, locked-up in the form of clathrates or gas-hydrates.

Methane is known to be a powerful greenhouse gas. If just 10% of the methane hydrates were to reach the atmosphere in a few years, it would be equivalent to raising the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere by a factor of 10. These reservoirs are extremely unstable - a slight increase in temperature and pressure can cause them to destabilize.

While David Archer, in his book The Long Thaw, thinks this is unlikely to happen any time soon, Mark Maslin points out in The Coming Storm: 

These reservoirs … pose a major risk as warming will heat up both the oceans and the permafrost and could cause ice surrounding the methane to melt, pumping hugh amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 21 [Archer says 30] times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. If enough is released into the atmosphere it would raise temperatures even more rapidly, releasing still more gas-hydrates in a runaway greenhouse effect.

In fact, it could even trigger massive explosions with unknown consequences.

There have of course been numerous recorded "ice ages" known to geological science, and subsequent periods of warming with little ice ages. These have been attributed to various interactive causes, earth wobbles etc.

While scientists tend to be very conservative in their pronouncements, Archer concedes that:

The hothouse climate of 40 million years ago probably did not have much methane hydrate in it... The hydrates we have today probably grew in the cooler times more recently than that. If the earth returns to a hothouse climate, it seems inevitable that it would eventually lose most of that methane. It is an open question... Hydrate stability calculations suggest that hydrates could ultimately release as much carbon as the CO2 released from fossil fuels, doubling the long-term climate impact of global warming,

With most of these frozen hydrate deposits found deep beneath the sediment on the continental shelves, including that of New Zealand, why are we risking releasing methane into the atmosphere by such cavalier methods as drilling deep sea oil wells into the ocean floor?

Did methane play any part in the explosion in the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico?

Surprise, surprise! According to Maslin's map, there just happens to be a large deposit of frozen gas-hydrates off the East Coast of the North Island, in the area where a South American oil exploration company has contracted rights to drill an exploratory deep sea oil well.

This seems is to be in total disregard of the lessons learnt from the disastrous oil well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the existence of the fault-line off our coast and the historic record of the 1931 Napier earthquake. This is also magnified by new irrefutable evidence of ocean warming from our own scientists and oceanographers, here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Of course, there are those who only see dollar signs and have myopic short term vision - or perhaps see economic collapse from an energy crisis as a more immediate concern.

I mentioned this 'frozen fire' deposit to James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) when he was here recently to warn and hopefully convince us of the urgent need for action on climate change. He expresses this cogently and with great authority in his book Storms of My Grandchildren.

Subsequently, by chance, I picked up some throw-out books from the local library. One of these was a novel with the title Frozen Fire. One of the coauthors, Marianna Jameson, is a senior technical writer and editor in the aerospace, defense software and the environmental engineering industries. Interesting!

It is a horrendous novel of intrigue, greed, and national security. A maniacal privateer has an insane plan to mine and monopolise the frozen gas-hydrate from the ocean floor in the Caribbean, to out-flank and ruin the oil companies. Equally insane are the greenies out to destroy his plan, who - like the right-to-lifers who blow up abortion clinics - are responsible for a massive explosion that subsequently kills all the animal life in the sea and many of the people in the immediate region of the Caribbean and Florida coast. The world is saved eventually by methane-eating bacteria cultivated by a brilliant biologist.

I found this interesting, as the first patent on a living organism, leading to the controversial patenting of the human genome itself, was that given in the USA to Chakrabaty for a similar organism that eats oil.

Marianna Jameson's historic connections suggested to me that this madness and rivalry in the search for other sources of energy with a fossil fuel origin - rather than wind, wave and solar power – by mining the frozen methane from the ocean floor for profit and private gain may not be so far from the truth as to what is being planned. Paranoia, maybe?

With all the damage being done to our planet and environment, this seems to me even more reason why we need take all this seriously. We must act with speed and determination to prevent deep sea mining and fracking and challenge the profit driven ideology behind it. We must also challenge an economic system dependent on limitless growth, eternal frontiers and manifest destiny, before we are hit with the coming perfect storm.