Re: ENERGY: Singularity on hold?

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Jun 14 2003 - 22:28:43 MDT

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    On Sat, 14 Jun 2003, Mike Lorrey, testing my solar pond idea, wrote:

    > How, pray tell, do you plan on collecting all of this methane without
    > releasing it all to the atmosphere and REALLY causing a runaway
    > greenhouse effect?

    Initially coat the ponds with polyethylene, plexiglass or some other
    transparent sealant material. Ultimately have the ponds coat themselves
    with "pond scum" which is impervious to methane (so it collects under
    the surface layer). The goal being to convert the atmospheric CO2
    into CH4 which when burnt gets converted back into CO2. That is a
    sustainable cycle. As you point out -- making sure you don't have
    a lot of leakage is important. But it remains an interesting question
    (because we don't have an experimental system to test) whether the
    methane leakage produced by solar ponds on rangeland would be less
    than the methane leakage produced by cattle on rangeland...

    > Do you plan on turning the whole west into
    > greenhouses? Have you accounted for the energy demands of such a system?

    In my current estimates the calculations are only based on reasonable
    photosynthetic energy conversion rates. They do not include things
    like the pumping cost for salt water to the ponds or say transport
    removal costs for salt back to the oceans (if necessary). But there
    is a huge upside potential if you can bump up photosynthetic efficiency
    by even minor amounts (most agricultural crops get 1-2%).

    The ponds are not "greenhouses", they have a very shallow depth,
    probably 18 inches or less. The structures should be designed
    such that they require very little skilled labor (and are therefore
    low cost) to build. In my mind I'm thinking structures like the
    terraced rice fields in Asian countries.

    Robert



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