์ผ๋ณธ์ Methane Hydrate ๊ฐ๋ฐ ๋ด์ค๋ฅผ ๋ณด๋ฉฐ...
An Energy Coup for Japan: ‘Flammable Ice’
Published: Wednesday, 13 Mar 2013 | 8:43 AM ET
By: By Hiroko Tabuchi
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100545740
CNBC์ ๋ค์๊ณผ ๊ฐ์ ๊ธฐ์ฌ๊ฐ ๋ฌ์ต๋๋ค.
Japan said Tuesday that it had extracted gas from offshore deposits of methane hydrate — sometimes called "flammable ice" — a breakthrough that officials and experts said could be a step toward tapping a promising but still little-understood energy source.
์ผ๋ณธ์ด ํด์ ์์ methane hydrate ์ํ ์์ฐํ๋๋ฐ ์ฑ๊ณตํ์๋ค๊ณ ํฉ๋๋ค.
Researchers had already successfully extracted gas from onshore methane hydrate reservoirs, but not from beneath the seabed, where much of the world's deposits are thought to lie.
์ก์ง์์ ๋ฉํ ํ์ด๋๋ ์ดํธ๋ฅผ ์ถ์ถํ๋ ๊ฒ์ ์ด๋ฏธ ์ฑ๊ณตํ ์ ์ด ์์ง๋ง, ํด์ ์์๋ ์์ง ์๋์์ฃ .
Japan has invested hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s to explore offshore methane hydrate reserves in both the Pacific and the Sea of Japan.
์ด๋ฅผ ์ํด์ ์ผ๋ณธ์ 2000๋
๋ ์ด๋ฐ๋ถํฐ ํํ์๊ณผ ๋ํด์์ ์์ต ๋ฌ๋ฌ๋ฅผ ํฌ์ํด ์ค๊ณ ์์์ต๋๋ค. ์ด๋ฐ ๊ธฐ์ฌ๊ฐ ๋์ฌ ๋๋ง๋ค ์ผ๋ณธํด๋ ์ธ์์ ์ฌ์ด์ฃผ๋ฉฐ.
Experts estimate that the carbon found in gas hydrates worldwide totals at least twice the amount of carbon in all of the earth's other fossil fuels, making it a potential game-changer for energy-poor countries like Japan.
๋ฌปํ์๋ ์ ์์ฒด๊ฐ ๋ง์ ๊ฑธ๋ก ์ถ์ ๋๋ค ๋ณด๋ ์๋์ง ๋น๊ตญ์๊ฒ๋ ์๋์ง ์์ฅ์ ํ์ ํ๋ค ์ ์์ ๊ฑฐ๋ผ๋ ํฐ ๊ธฐ๋๋ฅผ ๋ง๋ค๊ณ ,
Japan hopes to make the extraction technology commercially viable in about five years.
์ผ๋ณธ์ 5๋
๋ด ์์
ํ๋ฅผ ํฌ๋งํ๊ณ ์์ต๋๋ค.
"This is the world's first trial production of gas from oceanic methane hydrates, and I hope we will be able to confirm stable gas production," Toshimitsu Motegi, the Japanese trade minister, said at a news conference in Tokyo. He acknowledged that the extraction process would still face technical hurdles and other problems. "shale gas was considered technologically difficult to extract but is now produced on a large scale," he said. "By tackling these challenges one by one, we could soon start tapping the resources that surround Japan."
๊ธฐ์ ์ ์ธ ๋ฌธ์ ์ ๋ค๋ฅธ ๋ฌธ์ ๋ค์ด ์์์ ์์ง๋ง, ๊ธฐ์ ์ ์ผ๋ก ๊ฐ๋ฐ์ด ์ด๋ ต๋ค๊ณ ๋ดค๋ ์
ฐ์ผ๊ฐ์ค๊ฐ ์๋์ง ์์ฅ์ ํ๋ค๊ณ ์๋ฏ, ๋ฉํ ํ์ด๋๋ ์ดํธ๋ ๊ฐ๋ฅํ ๊ฑฐ๋ผ๋ ์๊ฐ์ด์ฃ .
"Now we know that extraction is possible," said Mikio Satoh, a senior researcher in marine geology at the institute who was not involved in the Nankai trough expedition. "The next step is to see how far Japan can get costs down to make the technology economically viable."
์ผ๋ณธ์ ๊ธฐ์ ์ ๋ฌธ์ ๊ฐ ์๋๋ผ ๋น์ฉ์ ์ผ๋ง๋ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ํฐ ํญ์ผ๋ก ๋ฎ์ถ๋์ ๋ฌธ์ ์ผ ๋ฟ์ด๋ผ๊ณ ๋ด
๋๋ค.
ํ์ง๋ง... ๊ทธ๊ฒ ๋ค๋ ์๋๋๋ค.
The exact properties of undersea hydrates and how they might affect the environment are still poorly understood, given that methane is a greenhouse gas.
ํด์ ์ ๋ฉํ ํ์ด๋๋ ์ดํธ ์์ฐ์ด ํ๊ฒฝ์ ์ด๋ค ์ํฅ์ ๋ฏธ์น ์ง๋ ์์ง ๊ฑฐ์ ํ์ธ๋์ง ์์๋ค๋ ๋ฌธ์ ๊ฐ ์์ฃ .
Any accidental release of large amounts of methane during the extraction process would also be harmful.
๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ์ฌ๊ณ ๋ก ๋๊ท๋ชจ ์ ์ถ๊ณผ ๊ฐ์ ์ผ์ด ๋ฐ์ํ ๊ฒฝ์ฐ ๋งค์ฐ ์ํํ ์ ์์ต๋๋ค.
Scientists at the geological survey note, however, that there is still a limited understanding of how drilling for hydrates might affect the environment, particularly the possible release of methane into the atmosphere, and are calling for continued research and monitoring.
๊ณผํ์๋ค์ ์ํ๋ฉด ์์ง ๋ฉํํ์ด๋๋ฆฌ๋ ์์ถ๊ฐ ํ๊ฒฝ์ ๋ฏธ์น๋ ์ํฅ์ ๋ํ ์ฐ๊ตฌ๊ฐ ๋ฏธ์งํ๋ค๊ณ ํฉ๋๋ค.
์ด๋ฌํ ์ผ๋ณธ์ ๋ฉํ ํ์ด๋๋ ์ดํธ ํ์ฌ ๋
ธ๋ ฅ์ด ์ผ๋ณธ์ ์๋์ง ์๋ณด ์ฐจ์์์๋ ์ดํด๊ฐ ๋ฉ๋๋ค.
ํ์ง๋ง, ๋ํด๋ฅผ ์ผ๋ณธํด๋ก ๊ธฐ์ ์ฌ์คํ ํ๋ คํ๊ณ , ๋
๋๊น์ง ํ๋ด๋ ์ผ์์ ๋ฌธ์ ์
๋๋ค. ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ๋ ํฐ ๋ฌธ์ ๋ ํ๊ฒฝ์ ๋ํ ๊ฒ์ฆ์ด ๋์ง ์์ ์ฑ ๊ฐ๋ฐ์ ๊ฐํํ ๊ฒฝ์ฐ ์์นซ ์๋ชปํ๋ฉด ๋ํด์ ์ํ๊ณ๊ฐ ์๊ฐ์ง ๋ชปํ ๋ฐฉํฅ์ผ๋ก ํ๊ดด๋๊ณ ๋ง๋ ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ๋ก ์ด์ด์ง ์ ์๋ค๋ ์ ์
๋๋ค.