Wesley Bruce
Are you aware of the bio-methane projects of the 1970's? See
page 15 of this PDF
http://www.pacaqua.org/Documents/Marine_Macroalgae_Culture.pdf
Thanks! I had forgotten about this. The whole document is
interesting for both vegitarians and anti-oil ecologists. Nori
lovers will not want their food supply threatened however ... and
tank farming is too expensive for fuel anyway.
Open-ocean tethered farming, as on page 15 might be an option...
but... one of the better of these ocean biomass ideas once seemed
to be based on open ocean "farming" of the Sargasso Sea. There you
would not need permanent structures or tethers - just a catamaran
style factory boat with open-weave catchment filters between the
two hulls.
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues98/nov98/sargasso.html
http://plankt.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/12/2233
There seems to be a forum dedicated to ocean-biomass ideas for
"gasification" but I can't get access to all of it:
http://listserv.repp.org/pipermail/gasification/
and they have mentioned some of the numbers
http://listserv.repp.org/pipermail/gasification/2003-November/000427.html
Such as "One Million Square Miles" of biomass... !!
Wonder why they focus on gasification instead of ethanol? I was
about to temporarily give up on the Amazon bio-ethanol idea, but
hey...
...wow, just look at those number for the Sargasso sea! Even at
fairly low density of BTU per area, there could easily be 100
quads of annual biomass in there! However, this will certainly
inflame and infuriate the seaweed-huggers (who most likely have
been carefully chosen and funded by Exxon to pounce on any mention
of an alternative to Arab oil)....
Jones
