Huge amounts of methane are emitted by freshwater catchment areas, dams, lakes and river deltas as vegetative debris breaks down. Gathering this gas is of no interest to Big Business; it’s too diffuse & low-pressure while the gathering, compression and transportation are too expensive and labour intensive. Far better for them to drill a deep hole and bring up high-pressure gas ready for cleaning and sale. However, under a Global Warming scenario, and in the presence of a Carbon Trading regime the economic perspective shifts provided one is prepared to adopt a low-tech, long-term outlook.
The STEP concept posits gathering gas from a huge area like the Amazon delta; a region where energy sources, other than burning wood, are scarce. Gas could be gathered by a fleet of floating concrete barges, little more than upturned basins with a simple drilling rig on top. These would be family-run units operating under license from the Brazilian Gas Authority, who would run the co-operative collection and processing facilities. A commercial spin-off activity would be the harvesting of wood long buried in the alluvium. Hardwood retains its quality for many years when buried in anoxidative conditions, and would be an attractive material for the construction of ‘ecologically friendly’ furniture and the like. The methane, together with unusable wood pieces, would be burned in a CO2-capturing power plant to provide electricity and hydrogen (see Oxycell). The CO2 would be dispersed in the deep ocean locally.
With an enterprise designed to work over the entire Amazon basin for the next 200 years, the supply of hardwood itself could subvert the terrible rape of Indonesian timber currently in progress, while making Amazonia an energy self-sufficient region, saving rainforest, improving air quality, promoting tourism while mitigating emissions of Greenhouse Gas.
The same system could be used in dams and reservoirs on a more limited scale.
