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Hey, can we gather that blob, dry it, and burn it as fuel?
by phkahler 3y ago
Hey, can we gather that blob, dry it, and burn it as fuel?
- twelve40 3y agothey do that with a fraction of it, but it's 5500 miles long (twice the width of the continental US for comparison) so yeah...
- dylan604 3y agowhy is that a deterrent? just cut down into smaller size chunks just like we poke the earth full of holes to leak out the oil instead of sucking it out in one go.
- twelve40 3y agolikely because it costs a ton of money? but maybe is simply hasn't occurred to anyone who lives there for the last 10 years
- munificent 3y agoLove that you used "just" twice to equate something to as much effort as the building and operation of the entire petroleum industry.
- pavlov 3y agoBurning biomass isn’t ideal when we’re dealing with an atmospheric CO2 crisis. Maybe we should instead try to accelerate the blob’s growth so it would absorb more CO2.
- phkahler 3y ago>> Burning biomass isn’t ideal when we’re dealing with an atmospheric CO2 crisis. But it might offset other carbon based fuels. I was just trying to think of a use for that massive blob to get rid of it. CO2 may be a threat down the road, but what if this blob chokes the oceans in 3 to 5 years? It's growing fast.
- gishbunker 3y agoInterestingly, pyrolizing biomass produces energy and solid carbon that can be sequestered. So while it produces less energy than burning biomass, it's energy positive and carbon negative if you bury the carbon output. So gathering and heating biomass as a resource isn't necessarily the wrong general idea.
- x3874 3y ago> atmospheric CO2 crisis (citation needed)
- giarc 3y agoInstead can it collect it and sink it to store the carbon? https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-carbon-removal-seaweed-sinking-climate-change/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-car...
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThis. Robotic sargassum farming and harvesting, followed by depositing remains in sacrificial oceanic trenches.
- culi 3y agowell apparently there's a risk of having to interact with a bacteria that can eat both plastic and flesh...
- ajmurmann 3y agoI thought these just attach to plastic. Eating plastic would be great news, right?
- culi 3y agoIt depends on your perspective. We still don't know the impacts of microplastics so more microplastics might be bad news. It's also bad news for a lot of our infrastructure which depends on the assumption that plastics aren't biodegradable