Algae grows incredibly fast. It sucks CO2 out of the air. And some strains of the stuff are more than 50% vegetable oil, which is very cheap to convert into BioDiesel?.
So what we do is flood great flat regions of the earth like, say, what used to be the inner sea of central Australia, and create biodiesel-fueled industries to farm them. We sell the biodiesel to other industries in order to pay for the vast infrastructure required. We also seek national and international grants to fund the thing.
Questions:
- Is this big enough to even start to PutTheCarbonBack? And how do we figure that out?
- Which politicians do we talk to to kick it off, and how can we twist their arms?
- Are there enough nutrients left in the OldInlandSea? to do this? What nutrients do algae need, anyway?
Others?
Wouldn't it make sense to start by just culturing and composting the stuff... in your back yard? As long as it wouldn't rot I guess the net effect would be better than planting a tree? We have a pretty short light season up here in Finland, but if I had a garden I would try anyway...
If you flooded central australia, you'd be turning the rest of the continent into a monsoon-prone region.
Speaking as an Australian, I and my countrymen would be only too incredibly grateful to find our continent becoming a monsoon-prone region. Our major cities are already in danger of running out of water.
- All of Australia's major cities are on the coast, and desalination technology is becoming affordable.
- Most of the continent is desert. A monsoon would make it bloom. Of course there's no topsoil ...
Additionally, the simplest hydrological model would have the new inland sea turning into another Dead Sea. So even attempting this scheme would have massive negative repercutions.
Depends on what algae need to live. Of course there was an inland sea in Australia right up to just 60,000 years ago. Which is when we - men - turned up. No one is entirely certain what men did in Australia to completely destroy such a large ecosystem. But it probably wasn't much different to what they did elsewhere - the ecosystem was just closer to a nasty TippingPoint than elsewhere.
- Actually, Australia never had an inland sea. It had a vast system of lakes that are often called seas but were definitely freshwater, not saltwater. Which makes perfect sense since dried up seas would have left dead salt flats like in Utah. The difference is important because the proposal on this page involves poisoning a great chunk of the Australian continent with salt, which would be a great crime against humanity.
- I did say the idea is hare-brained. But I don't see that there's any life left in this chunk of continent to poison. It's flat red earth for thousands of miles in all directions.
- Deserts are usually alive. And the Australian desert used to be rainforest not too long ago so it's at least conceivable that it could come back. What you're proposing would poison it for eternity. There would be a few short years when you could grow algae followed by an eternity of death.
- Swap a new and barren ecosystem for the earth's oceans? Well, that's not a hard choice I think. And once the CarbonCrisis? is over, well, we'd have time to nanotech/biosynth a cleanup organism. No, the question is whether it could do any good.
- It wouldn't be an ocean in the way you describe. Within a few years or decades, the salinity would far surpass that of an ocean. And there wouldn't be any nanotech/biosynthing a cleanup organism. The result would be millions of tons of salt just lying there like a big white desert. The cost of cleaning it up would be astronomical. You'd actually have to fill the poisoned area with fresh water and pump it all uphill out to the ocean. It might take centuries to clean up a sea you'd enjoy for a few decades at best.
- By "swap" I mean that if using seawater to flood and farm the interior would do any good, it'd preserve the worlds' oceans by reducing the CO2 that's making them acidic -- a worthwhile exchange, if it could work. As for the cleanup cost, it would be astronomical with current technology, but MolecularNanotechnology?, once developed, would make gross adjustments in the arrangement of materials very cheap. It's still a sacrifice, but the Australian desert hasn't had time to evolve much diversity in just 60,000 years. If MassiveAlgaeFarming were actually sufficient to reduce atmospheric CO2, it would be a stopgap to keep humanity alive long enough to develop MNT.
- Speaking of ocean acidity, it strains credulity that CO2 levels are the highest they've ever been since the Cambrian explosion, and if they're not, that means the worlds' oceans have had to deal with high acidity in the past.
- Living organisms adapt. But they need time to adapt. Change their conditions too fast, and you get massive dieback. Some organisms survive and evolve to fill all the empty niches, but don't count on top predators being among the survivors ...
- Besides, why do we care about ocean acidity? As long as the biosphere survives in more or less sufficient condition to sustain humanity until MNT hits, it doesn't really matter. Overfishing and destructive fishing seem to be more of a problem than ocean acidity.
- Read the link on KillAllHumans. Ocean acidity is forecast to reach levels by 2050 at which krill and related organisms will no longer be able to form shells. Once they go, the rest goes, and us with it.
Furthermore, it wouldn't achieve anything since plant growth requires access to nutrients and minerals. Things which are in short supply away from soils and crashing ocean currents. Neither of which would exist in the middle of a new inland sea on top of an old fricking desert.
Good question - don't know what nutrients, if any, algae needs. I've added it above.
Massive algae farming will never fly for two very simple reasons. One it's a megaproject and governments today don't tend to go for megaprojects. Second, it's a political megaproject. Getting it okayed politically would be even more difficult than actually doing it. That makes it a megaproject squared and it's why it will never, ever happen.
As stated on GrandOpenSourceProject, this is not envisioned as a government project. I don't know what a GOSP looks like - maybe it looks like Linux? Like wiki? Like something completely different? The idea here is not to campaign for government to do this - it is to gather together enough geekish begriffschrifft to make it happen whether governments like it or not.
But hey, if you want to play pretend as if it could happen then at least pull up some topographical maps and give a concrete proposal what's going to be flooded, and how.
That's the spirit. Now I fancy the first thing we'll want is someone who remembers enough about AvogadrosNumber? to calculate the necessary algal volume ...
Humorous rant moved to InsureThePlanet
How about you two LetHotPagesCool? And perhaps warm up the PandemicResponsePattern to inject more information so others know why it can be more urgent than cleaning up / poisoning the Australian desert? If I am correct you are dealing with conditions that is at least ten years away, whereas the media is stirring up the audience about massive disruptions less than 5 years, or perhaps even this winter.
Hmm. WhatShouldWeBeScaredOfNext??
- Let me continue on a bit (re: this topic vs Pandemic...). Maybe readers here are all "critical thinkers" and would not be swayed by media (honestly I do not know what has been communicated constitute FUD). However most of us have know teenagers and / or other more impressionable individuals. Our calm and composure won't do much good during an AnxietyStampede?, or reverse an equally destructive ApathyCalcified silence.
Actually we're talking about current disruptions. I don't know about you but I sure don't remember any natural disasters in, say, the early 90s the same way that I remember the pretty damned regular series of disasters ever since.
I don't understand how this relates to above paragraphs
It's all caused by global warming, bud.
Not the upcoming H5N1 pandemic. Human activity, possibly yes. Not activity that results in global warming.
Ahhh, I misunderstood. Ok, well global warming is more important than a pandemic because it has the potential to wipe out human civilization. A pandemic would merely cull the human herd and might actually turn out to be a good thing. A pandemic wouldn't affect industry or infrastructure but would strike down humans pretty randomly and uniformly. Except of course for poor people. Of course, this only applies if I get to be in the 50% that survive it.
Why bother flooding Australia? As if there isn't enough ocean surface on the planet yet?
Something like 50% of Earth's algae biomass lives in a few very small areas of the ocean, where ocean upwelling brings them nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous. These areas are created by various deep-ocean currents (which global warming is starting to suppress, by the way). Fine; build a really BIG pump (solar or wind power; biodiesel puts the carbon back into the atmosphere and is hard to make a net energy profit out of) and a really LONG pipe, floating out in the middle of the ocean. Pump up immense amounts of deep seawater, making an artifical upwelling, making an algae bloom around it.
Only problem I can see with this (besides getting someone to fund it) is the fact that the deep ocean also contains massive amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide. The algae growth may or may not be sufficient to pull it back down into the deep ocean; probably so, but I have been wrong before.
-- SimonHeath
why flood anywhere? - why not keep the algae in some sort of transparent container, therfore reducing the effect on the enclosing ecosystem.
In the 1970s, the USA Department of Energy looked at growing algae: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/biodiesel_from_algae.pdf. Interesting points,
- they focused on saline-tolerant species, planning to get some use from tracts of existing land with salt contamination
- algae to grow in open-top shallow oval ponds/channels, circulated by paddle, nutrients to come from coal-fired power station exhaust
- experiments aimed to boost the lipid fraction of the resultant algae, for extraction and manufacture of bio-diesel; remainder to be fed to cattle or burned in the power station
- boosting lipid fraction seemed to require starving the algae so the total yield went down
- project halted in the US because it was expected to be twice the price of pumping oil out of wells, but other countries have shown an interest
Recently developed techniques for conversion of cellulose to ethanol might make a difference here, I don't know if anyone has done the sums or tried it. -- MatthewAstley
Part of the GrandOpenSourceProject called PutTheCarbonBack.
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Massive Algae Farming