You may have seen news items about Shell’s Prelude LNG ship – the largest sea-going vessel of all time. I like the graphic above that shows it in contrast to the Sydney Opera House – the ship is the orange shape at the back! It is designed to be a floating platform for extracting natural gas (methane) from the sea bed. It then cools and compresses this until it condenses and forms liquid natural gas (LNG) which can be transported by specially designed cargo ships.
Natural gas is the cleanest of the three fossil fuels but it still produces carbon dioxide when burned – something that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says we should be reducing. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing Global Warming and one of the ways that we might combat this is to burn less fossil fuel. Instead of wholeheartedly looking for an alternative to fossil fuels, Shell and many other companies are looking at ways to exploit previously hard to reach reserves of natural gas and oil.
This is part of a long series of posts about Climate Change. Some of them are quite old but they might be worth a browse if you are interested in the topic. There is a poll in the menu at the top of the page that asks one very simple question. Go there now and have an opinion! If there is anything else that you think we should have a poll about on this blog then do please leave a suggestion in the comments.
The video below is of slightly lower quality and is older – dating back nearly a year. It explains a little more about what the Prelude will do when at sea.
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Whatever the politics of it, the Prelude is a staggering engineering achievement.
Questions…
- What are the three main fossil fuels?
- When methane is burned in plenty of oxygen, what are the two chemicals produced?
- To what class of compounds does methane belong?
- What is meant by ‘renewable energy‘?
- Suggest a form of renewable energy.
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