 | Abqaiq and Eat It Too (or, More Geological Analysis of Potential Saudi Depletion) | The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: May 16, 2008 |  |
161 comments on Australia: What to do, what to do about our energy situation?
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Phosphorus, iron, and other nutrients. The smart way to address this is to grow the algae in sewage, brackish water, water with a high salinity, or a mixture of any or all of these. The ideal place would be in outback areas with lots of sunshine, some distance from towns, where there is access to town effluent and other sources of low-quality water. Remember that the intent is to pull CO2 out of the air, so the algae sludge must be sequestered. The phosphorus will not be removed and reused, but the sequestered ash will probably end up on a farm somewhere, so the phosphorus will probably stay in use (and may end up in a cycle: algae->ash->farm->food->sewage->algae ).
You could be right. My research in this area was superficial. I remember concluding that dirigibles offered a huge improvement over jet travel, but I did not compare them to prop-driven aircraft.
This is one of my darkest fears. Carbon Capture and Sequestering is economic suicide for any company that is trying to do it at the point of production. CCS at point of production (given current technologies) does not make sense. However pulling CO2 out of the air using algae is very fast - it has been a reliable way to change global CO2 levels for the last few hundred million years... algae reproduces faster than we do. This might be the cheap way out.
I am concerned about that too. However I think there is a possibility (not a probability) that we may face a rapid collapse of the Greenland ice sheet in few years causing sea levels to start rising by a significant amount.
I have no idea what the global response will be as low lying areas, including in cities such as New York and London, as well as significant areas in the non Western countries might induce a panic cut back on coal use, leading to impossible economic conditions.
Dealing with PO in these circumstances will be impossible.
Interesting Saildog, to find someone else that thinks it's a possibility that Greenland could have a partial collapse and flood low lying coastal regions. If that does happen it would be the best case scenario as far as providing a potential way to stop global warming. If enough fresh water were to be released in a partial collapse, it would slow or stop the thermohaline conveyor, and the weather would shift into a short or long term ice age. Since the oceans hold a thousand times more thermal energy than the atmosphere, water temperature rules the weather (as evidenced by La Nina this past winter). The result would be a growing ice sheet in the north and super hot hurricane and tornadic driven weather at the equator. The areas of the Earth conducive to human civilization would diminish, however the planet would be saved from the methane hydrates along the continental shelves releasing into the atmosphere, which are 25 times more potent than CO2 in their green house effect. If all that methane did release without the induction of an ice age, then the Earth would become such a hot environment, human existence would be a small fraction of today's population.