>US usage is around 20 M bbl/day, world production around 80 M bbl/day.
>If this thing gets loose in the sea, BPs disaster would seem like
>nothing. Better to hope it can't be done.
I raised that question with Gautam, who is a former member of Brin-L and
happens to be a published author in the field of biosecurity. He also
happens to know one of the leaders in the field personally: the man wrote
the proposal for the human gnome project as his PhD dissertation.
The answer is that the plants that are being used now suffer from the
problem of being hothouse plants. They are the opposite of kudzu....they
have a hard time surviving in the wild.
In fact, the candidates that now exist require a rare supplement that isn't
found in ocean water. It won't be costly to supply it, but they don't grow
without it. It's kinda like worrying that corn will displace the woodlands.
>SBSP will get into that range if there is a way to get transport to
>GEO down into the $100 per kg or less range.
Which I think will happen when Star Wars works. :-) In the field of
synthetic biology prices have been falling a factor of two per year for the
last decade or so. That's one of the reasons it fits the black swan model.
With solar and space, it's always tomorrow when prices fall like a rock.
A pilot plant is being built in TX as we speak. We'll know more in a year.
Dan M.
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