According to "Japan extracts gas from methane hydrate in world first" article, Japan announces that their pilot experiment has success to extract natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off which they planed to use this energy source for participial use within next half a decade.
This new energy source is approximately at least 1.1 Tn cubic meters which stored in the deposit site and it can provide a decade of Japan's gas consumption; however, the deposit site is on still the unstable underwater geology. Therefore, they concerned about earthquake disaster which it might easily occur in that place. Therefore, this might be a big decision that Japanese government has to make and it might need a huge money to do its.
One of causes of expensive energy problem in Japan has occurred after Japan's coast, was destroyed by tsunami disaster which it destroyed one of the nuclear power plants named Fukushima in two years ago. Their government ordered to stop using nuclear power plant in its country. The result was show that the increasing of their energy cost.
Japanese engineers who created and conducted this experiment might have had their passion to find the new energy source from their expensive energy problems since a huge against nuclear power the Fukushima nuclear disaster two years ago. It might be only a few good thing that Japanese people get from their disaster. In consequence,after they use this new energy, the Big Japanese car producers might develop new engines to support their new energy source. this can affect to their energy cost in the future.
In the past, when I was a child, I remembered that the price of oil in Thailand quite very cheaper than its nowadays, for example, to fill full gas tank in motorcycle,In the past people paid twenty baht, whereas nowadays I have to paid about one hundred and fifty bath. It is almost 8 times increased.
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Bas this news was attract me when I skim today news web page.I completely agree with you that when I was young any kind of petrol were much more cheaper than nowadays.One cuase of this problem seems come from people use much more such as the car factory produce the car to custumer 24 hours a day now to supply those cars to customers on the times. But seems we have limited natural gas so it lead to we need to import from outside which lead to increase this cost every years.I really envy Japanese people too in case of they probably use cheaper oil in the future soon which cover to half a decade or more than that. However,our government should strongly promote people here use less and save more too.
ReplyDeleteIn my perspective, Japan is one of the successful countries in the world. It can be compared with Western Countries, such as UK, USA, Germany, or France. Even though most Japanese confront with the nightmare 2 years ago, Tsunami, they also recover rapidly and remain stable. In terms of energy, when the government ordered to stop using nuclear power plants, scientists and experts also discovered the new source of energy which is used in the future. Japanese may be lucky to use frozen methane in cheap cost and use it forever, unless earthquake disaster impedes to extract this type of energy.
ReplyDeletewhen turning to my country, I agree with Bas's opinion that oil price has increased dramatically a few years ago. Therefore, it is unavoidable to consume the petrol at the high price. I mean this is our fate...
I think this is a good chance for Japanese to use a cheaper and safer source of energy. I'm quire sure that the Japanese government will not be reluctant to do this project. not only combustion of natural gas are cleaner than oil and coal, but also the natural-gas power plants are easy to built with small amount of maintenance costs. Moreover, Japanese are suffering with lack of energy since the nuclear power plant was wiped out. the demand of electricity will urge the process of the decision.
ReplyDeleteI through that although natural gas is a clean energy and it has a cheap price, we should not use it too much because it still is one of natural resources which one day, they can run out itself. Therefore, people should use it just only their minimum requirement.
ReplyDeleteWe can see a good example of this from Thailand. In this April, Myanmar will close the natural gas pipes to maintain them, which these pipes use for sending natural gas from Myanmar to Thailand, and the majority of Thai power plant use natural gas to generate electricity to provide for Thai residents. The result of this maintenance is that Thailand will have incidents lacked electricity while this maintaining period and Thai government announced the solution to solve these incidents in which many factories will have to close their production lines for many hours to keep the usage of electricity down. Otherwise, many cities might have a lack of electricity.
I think that this solution did not a long term solution which can solve this problem. According to many Thai governments, they want Thailand to be a manufacturing country by putting many benefits for attracting many foreign manufacturers and investors from other countries such as Japan to create new factories in Thailand. The governors might be never knew that the capacity of electricity never increase as they encourage foreigners to build new factories in Thailand. Moreover, many NGO and Thai people against new power plant. They also have many reasons to support their side, but now I didn’t see any NGO came out to solve these incidents. They are ridiculous group of people who never saw outside world, although some of NGO came from other countries.
DeleteI hope that these incidents shall remind Thai people to think about their usage energy and the ways out from this problem because this problem has been continue for many years, but Thai people never decided to create new power plants.
Thai government should create a long term solution for this problem and they should not just give benefits to many foreign manufacturers and investors, but the government must take care the consumption of electricity.
It seems like alternative energy is what people are alert to talk about now. Scientists predict that within the next forty years, oil reserves over the world will be depleted. So, they are talking about what will we use after using up of oil, there are many choices, for examples, solar energy, electrochemical cell,etc. In Thailand, there are many researches about alternative energy, for example, a car run by hydrogen power. For this example, it may sound pretty good since we can get hydrogen from electrolysis and water is renewable energy source. But to get hydrogen from that method, we have to use huge amount of electrical energy, additionally it may even not worth for the hydrogen power we will get. I hope that scientists will find another advantageous way for us soon.
ReplyDeleteI like Ming's point that some so-called "alternative" energy sources are really not very sensible when properly understood.
DeleteI think it would be a worthwhile investment to pour a lot of money into fusion energy. If we can make that work, it will pretty well solve our energy problems forever (or least so long as effectively be forever). In the meantime, the somewhat dirtier nuclear power might be worth reconsidering - I think it is at least cleaner than coal.
Ming's point also reminded me of what seems to me a flaw in the organic farming movement, apart from the fact that there is no solid evidence that spending a lot more for organic food has any health benefit. Organic farming requires far more use of natural resources, especially land, than does chemical intensive agriculture. People who care about preserving nature should surely be anti-organic farming, and yet it seems to be be the self-styled nature lovers who are spending big supporting the inefficient organic techniques.