Algae has to grow and, though I’m no botonist or scientist, it would seem to me we could not keep up with demand for the oil.
Although the technology will be many years away from maturity, it’s just really a question of scaling up,the process until the demand can be met, even if it meant doing something like taking over the entire desert region of the country.
“Algae has to grow and, though I’m no botonist or scientist, it would seem to me we could not keep up with demand for the oil.”
Big problems doing that. One needs sunlight, of course, and lots and lots of square footage. So the CA/NV desert seems good. OTOH, one needs lots and lots of water. So envision somehow getting that much water to the CA desert (divert the Colorado River?), covering the desert with hundreds of thousands (millions?)of acres of ponds, then collecting the goop, and trucking it out for refinement, refining it in a process that obviously takes a lot of energy to run in and of itself, and then refining it. That would be the minimum required to make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption.
Then somehow cleaning up the water and getting it back through the imperial valley so our food grown there doesn’t die, then to LA so George Clooney has something to drink; and do all of this without violating some environmental impact statement, tribal burying ground, or endangered species. It’s a far bigger project than Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and the California aqueduct together—and we could not build any one of those projects today.