Jones Beene wrote:
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...
There are chemicals in seaweed that may make ethanol production
problematic. I know of many ethanol projects but none with sea weeds.
Drying and burning produces a lot of smoke due to water retaining gels
and thus poor combustion.
...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
The Sargasso appears to be light and grazing limited. Nutrients don't
produce a bloom unless there is a nutrient shortage for some other reason.
Note the diversity of the sargasso may have been reduced drasticly
during WW2. Many ships tried to avoid German subs by slipping south via
the sargasso. The Germans got some and the resulting oil spills may have
wiped out the larger species. That would explain why 12th to 18th
century drawing of the organisms vary from what is found today and why
crews feared the weed. There were larger and denser rafts in the past.
This is however only a speculation on my part.
All biomass projects must recover all non atmospheric nutrients and
return them to the soil. Otherwise they will not be sustainable.
