On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:00 AM, "Dan Minette" <danmine...@att.net> wrote:
(keith) >>US usage is around 20 M bbl/day, world production around 80 M bbl/day. >>If this thing gets loose in the sea, BPs disaster would seem like >>nothing. Better to hope it can't be done. > > I raised that question with Gautam, who is a former member of Brin-L and > happens to be a published author in the field of biosecurity. He also > happens to know one of the leaders in the field personally: the man wrote > the proposal for the human gnome project as his PhD dissertation. > > The answer is that the plants that are being used now suffer from the > problem of being hothouse plants. They are the opposite of kudzu....they > have a hard time surviving in the wild. > > In fact, the candidates that now exist require a rare supplement that isn't > found in ocean water. It won't be costly to supply it, but they don't grow > without it. It's kinda like worrying that corn will displace the woodlands. If you are going to grow it inside of glass tubes where you can supply the rare supplement, then the cost of the tubes has to be around 1/5th of the cost of solar power on an area basis. Because if it isn't, then it would be less expensive to use electric power to make hydrogen, sort CO2 out of the air and use F/T synthesis to make oil. >>SBSP will get into that range if there is a way to get transport to >>GEO down into the $100 per kg or less range. > > Which I think will happen when Star Wars works. :-) In the field of > synthetic biology prices have been falling a factor of two per year for the > last decade or so. Lasers, the critical element in transmitting power to rockets have been falling at least that fast. They are now up to 100kW continuous. Scale up by a factor of ten and buy them by the thousands to get the GW level of power you need for a 100 ton per hour parts pipeline to GEO. > That's one of the reasons it fits the black swan model. > With solar and space, it's always tomorrow when prices fall like a rock. > > A pilot plant is being built in TX as we speak. We'll know more in a year. If they can get around the fundamental problem of photosynthesis efficiency I will be highly impressed. Keith _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
