Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Thursday September 27, 2007

Under the sea

Frozen gas reserves spur partnership between Stanford, Haifa universities

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

joe eskenazi | staff writer

In “The Beverly Hillbillies,” all Jed Clampett needed to become an oil millionaire was an errantly placed shot from his scattergun.

If only it were so simple for professor Amos Nur.

Instead of black gold, Nur, a Stanford professor of geophysics, is interested in natural gas of the sort that powers stoves, heaters and “CNG” vehicles including many police cars.

But it’s not just any vein of natural gas (methane) he’s after: Nur hopes to extract it from vast reserves beneath the ocean floor. The problem is, it’s frozen solid and no one has any idea how to get it out.

That’s the quandary the Haifa-born scientist will be attempting to solve as the leader of a new partnership between Stanford and the University of Haifa. If the American and Israeli technicians can devise a method to extract the frozen methane from the massive reserves beneath the Mediterranean, it could have a transformative effect on the Jewish state’s dependency on volatile oil trading partners.

“It’s a very peculiar type of material. It turns out that if you mix natural gas with water, under a certain range of pressure and temperatures, it freezes into an ice-like solid,” explains Nur, a Stanford professor for 37 years.

“It has natural gas trapped in it. So, everywhere under the sea floor where we have a supply of natural gas, either from deeper levels or from bacteria that live right under the sea floor and chew up organic matter carried by rivers or dying algae, it freezes into an ice-like solid, which traps methane in it. The global amount, we believe, is so huge it boggles the mind.”

How huge? How mind-boggling? Well, explains Nur, by weight the amount of organic carbon — the “fuel” in “fossil fuel” — of all the known oil, coal and natural gas on the surface of the earth is only estimated to be half of the frozen undersea reserves.

The joint Stanford-Haifa project to tap these untouched reserves was spurred by an $8 million gift from New York businessman and television personality Leon Charney.

While Nur feels his group can accomplish a great deal with its $8 million starting endowment, that’s not much compared to what the Japanese have spent in the past decade. That nation’s government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into research, and has yet to produce a major breakthrough. Nur is, of course, aware of this, but he isn’t too concerned.

“You know how these things are. First of all, the Japanese government has poured big money into it. It’s unclear how much of that money ended up focused on research and development. This is government — a lot of [money] can just disappear on overhead,” he said with a laugh.

“Our deal is the opposite. We can focus on a couple of key issues and if we can demonstrate there is potential for this stuff to be possible, we can go and raise more funds to develop it further. It’s a from-the-bottom kind of approach.”

Natural gas burns cleaner than toxin-emitting petroleum products, though it still produces carbon dioxide. Natural gas also does not need to be refined, only compressed, which saves vast amounts of time, work and energy.

“Whether it’s Israel, Japan, Korea or India, for countries that are energy-poor, this could suddenly change their dependence on petroleum energy,” said Nur.

“Israel has a lot of smart people and thinking outside the box is a national sport there. Often it doesn’t work, but sometimes it leads to breakthroughs. I think the world could use some outside-the-box thinking about how you could produce this kind of stuff.”

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.