Methane
I’m a huge fan of so-called green technology, though I often have some trouble with the label. First of all, there’s nothing "green" about a solar panel, except by comparison to a coal or oil burning plant. Solar is at least highly renewable, and it cuts out the middle-man, in the sense that all energy essentially comes from the sun anyway. But construction and disposal of the panels or batteries is not as clean as it should be, and there is no free ride. It’s simply better than all of the current alternatives (except if you live in Seattle).
In a sense, the only truly "green" energy technology is photosynthesis. It takes CO2 and water and produces oxygen and sugar. What we really need is an organism or cellular process that produces clean energy more directly. One option is to use modified photosynthesis to separate out hydrogen and oxygen from water, to be stored and recombined later with a nice release of energy. Another is to engineer plants (algae, most likely) that produce more easily burnable hydrocarbons, like diesel.
Still, there’s no free ride. When those organisms die, they decompose and give off CO2 and methane. Methane is one of the most potent green-house gasses, and we have lots of it already, not counting the relatively small amount from our farms. Most of it is still locked up, frozen underwater, in bogs or tundra ice. Raise global temperatures as few as five degrees and those reserves could just give up the ghost, so to speak, and make a whole bunch of new ones. It’s the one-two punch of global warming.
So when it comes to oil companies researching ways to mine the existing methane reserves to burn them, I’m actually quite glad. One of the last stop-gap measures we’d have against runaway warming would be to preventively burn the methane for fuel, sequestering all of the resulting carbon in some nicely inert form, like buckyballs or nanotubes or diamonds.
Getting to it is still a problem. You can’t just tap a well. Nor do we have any easy way to steal the energy in that hydrocarbon and package up the carbon part for storage. But given the lack of action on stopping global warming, I’d be much happer if we hedged our bets and started slowly vacuuming up this frozen extinction-in-a-bottle sooner rather than later.
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