[Liberty Rattler]

Have you ever spent any time out in the Pacific ocean?

How are you going to keep your giant algael-mats from breaking up and blowing ashore when a big storm comes and you have to deal with 60 knot winds and 40 foot breaking waves?

What happens to the ecologicaly sensitive inter-tidal zone when your algae blows ashore? This could be almost as damaging as an oil-spill.

Maybe you think of growing the algae inland? What happens then when your salt water leaches into the ground water? As has been mentioned, fresh water in California is already precious.

This algae technology looks to be a long way off, if it ever turns out to be feasable at all.

BTW if it were a world war we'd have quite a time defending your algae from the enemy out in the ocean.

[Reeses]

Algae floats, is very seaworthy. It can take most anything the sea dishes out. There are lots of technical challenges to solve but it looks promising. Algae has been working billions of years and is the primary reason for the high oxygen / low CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. Petroleum originally comes from saltwater algae so the idea is not that far fetched.

Before oil drilling technology was developed whale oil was the thing. It was a biofuel that delivered itself to the coastal villages where it was needed most. We are coming full circle. We probably won't use whales to harvest the energy but we could. Many people don't know this but whales are dumber than cows. They have few natural predators so their brains had no reason to evolve much. If we can farm cattle we can grow and farm whales if we need to.

The oceans are extremely large. A great thing is that 200 miles out is international waters. There are few environmentalists and lawyers floating by to cause trouble. Algae has so many things going for it that it seems obvious to me it should be on the short list. Soon the towel heads will have nothing to do but pound sand.