Scientists Find a Cleaner Way to Extract Methane From Permafrost

Methane gas bubbles are seen trapped in the ice of a frozen thermokarst lake, which has an active methane seep. Kevin Hand, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory An international team of scientists says a new way of extracting methane gas trapped in permafrost has the potential to harvest more gas while burning fewer fossil fuels in the extraction process, as Newsweek reported. The scientists from Skoltech University in Russia and Heriot-Watt University in Scotland looked at the gas hydrates, which are ice-like structures made up of water and gas. Frequently, the gas trapped with the water is methane. They found that they could use flue gas, which is generated during fuel combustion, to recover methane. Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports , as Newsweek reported. By injecting hot waste flue gas from industrial plants into the gas hydrates, the scientists may have found a carbon sink that can trap the greenhouse gases created by industrial fuel combustion, according to New Atlas . The new method is important because gas and oil explorations in the Arctic have the potential to accidentally release a lot of trapped methane into the atmosphere. Recently, the Arctic waters around Russia have become […]

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