Michel Jullian wrote:
Thanks indeed to Mark for pointing out this process. Direct on-ship conversion would definitely be an immense plus, it's nice to see this scheme gathering momentum! Now we should make sure there are no major drawbacks of course. Robin raised a possible marine life protection issue, indeed it seems eels and turtles use the floating sargassum entanglements as shelters for reproduction and migration respectively... can harvesting methods/periods be tailored to protect that? Or will general interest prevail? And can anyone enforce marine protection laws in international waters?
The short answer is "no". But see: http://www.seashepherd.org/
The author of that patent application mentioned a possible algae property claiming problem in international waters (or will that be Bermudan waters?), anyone can comment on that? Michel P.S. Is this the right forum to continue this particular discussion BTW, or would creation of a specific list be in order so we don't make everyone here (sea) sick with it? Sorry for all the question marks...
Um, all things considered, the discussion seems pretty relevant. Latest note on oil, from the WSJ this afternoon:
Crude-oil prices settled at a new record high for the third trading session in a row, closing at $114.93 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, an advance of 1%. Crude futures have risen 4.4% over the last four trading days and climbed 13% so far in April.
If oil isn't peaking even as we speak then it's doing a darn good job of pretending to peak.
13% so far in April, let's see, we're just about 2 weeks into April, so that's 6.3% per week; if it were to continue at that pace, we'd hit $200/bbl in, what, a little less than 12 weeks.
$200/bbl oil this coming July -- now *that* would provide a bit of stimulus to the search for alternatives, eh?
The only "big" find I've seen any mention of recently is the new offshore field in Brazil, and it has some issues: It's not clear how big it really is, very little is known as yet, and the optimists are currently dominating the discussion; furthermore, it's under more than a mile of ocean so it's not going to be trivial to get it out. And it's only estimated to be in the double-digits of billions of barrels, IIRC, so it's not going to make much difference anyway.
