Seaweeds role as biofuel and carbon sequester

  1. Sustainability Issue: Energy, Carbon Emissions
  2. Technologies: Offshore seaweed and microalgae farming, which has been around for many years, can lead to mass production of clean energy in the form of biofuels. Seaweed grows faster than land-based plants and sequesters large CO2 amounts as it does, decreasing carbon emissions in the air. Feeding cattle seaweed can reduce their methane emissions. Furthermore, these efforts could restore carbon-rich marine ecosystems.
  3. Stakeholders:
    • US Department of Energy (who has already invested $1.5 million in this) & other governments
    • Farmers & wholesale buyers
    • Investors
    • Car companies & drivers
    • End consumers
    • Disaster areas where energy is not available on land
  4. Deployment first 3 steps:
    • Conduct further research to determine net benefits of seaweed, as well as effects on marine life.
    • Determine proper locations and times where seaweed can be harvested and create more commercialized farms with advanced components such as computer modeling and aquatic monitoring for better maintenance.
    • To begin using biofuels in cars however, more research must be done on improving the power density of this fuel source.
  5. Comment on Dominic Bell’s “Fog Harvesting for Water Resources” Post:
    • I’ve seen this being used on the coastal areas of South America as well. This comes from a survival technique, similar to using a plastic bag to collect transpiration from nearby plants and trees or from rainwater. My only concern is how does this trapping of condensation, which acts as the main sink of atmospheric water, affect the water cycle and climate?

sz2673

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s