A discovery by scientists may have more than doubled the world’s energy reserves. They have found vast amounts of natural gas frozen into the sea bed, potentially containing more energy than all the world’s known coal, oil and gas reserves combined. The research follows the growing excitement generated by Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (Jogmec), which has been drilling test wells into methane hydrate reserves in the Nankai trough, off Japan’s southwest coast. It predicts the first gas will be extracted this year, and suggests there could be enough methane hydrate in the trough to supply all Japan’s energy for 300 years. --Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times, 15 January 2012
This month, scientists will test a new way to extract methane from beneath the frozen soil of Alaska: they will use waste carbon dioxide from conventional wells to force out the desired natural gas. --Nicola Jones, Nature, 13 January 2012
The crash in gas prices strikes at the heart of a traditional green argument — that rising energy prices will eventually force a conversion to green energy. To hear them tell it, dwindling oil and gas supplies will drive energy prices into the stratosphere, turning the expensive “green” energy sources into profitable enterprises overnight. They’ve been making this argument since the first solar energy boom back in the 1970s, and, so far, nothing. --Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 13 January 2012
As shale moves into an economic story, it will becomes a political one. Most obviously this sets the stage for an Obama victory by default later this year. The two battleground swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio are at the epicenter of the shale boom, and those in work in the states won't be interested in how they got those jobs - just that they have them. Democrats will ignore, or oppose, shale at their peril. The impact of shale on the US economy and politics will be too compelling for Europeans to ignore. The key question of shale worldwide is going to be: If the US can do this, why not us? --Nick Grealy, No Hot Air, 12 January 2012
IT WAS billed as a scientific breakthrough providing a clean-energy future for the planet. The poster that lured the good folk of Mullumbimby said: "Hello clean, green, renewable, inexpensive cold fusion. You are invited to a public meeting." There was to be a Skype link-up to Italy with the physicist Andrea Rossi, who would explain how his E-cat machine could take a small amount of energy and turn it into lots of energy. Something for nothing. But when it was time for the link-up, the phone didn't ring. And it didn't ring. --Tim Barlass, The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2012
