The Lake McLEod example was but a theoretical exaple. Personally I envision many smaller operations spread out over Victoria, Southern Australia , WA and Queensland would make more sense from a distribution point of view.

Algal farms of say 10,000 hectares repeated 24 times is a more reasonable scale.

The inputs into these farms would be CO2, nitrogen and phospohorous. They would be many more times efficient in water usage than a crop grown for the same purpose. Yes the nitrogen and phosporous could be re extracted out of them after harvest.

It is interesting that these farms are actually CO2 sinks. It would be interesting to investigate the use of CO2 that has been captured from smoke stacks from our power stations.

An ideal postition for such an algal pond would be in close association with a power plant actually. It seems to me to be an attractive way of converting coal to biodiesel with the alga converting the CO2 to oil.

The Australian Green House Office might well be interested in this .

I was in the process of posting a response to Sten, but Ericc beat me to it, saying a lot of what I had in mind.

Unfortunately, there is usually a huge difference between the net output and the suggested possible production rate (under optimum conditions and often not considering the energy needed to extract it) for all these ideas on biofuels and the like. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but surely, if algal biofuel production was feasible at a significant scale, it would have been well and truly nutted out by now.

Yes Ericc, it beggars the question – how can there be so much thought and effort going into biofuel research, fossil fuel substitutes in general, and post peak-oil strategies, while so utterly little effort is going towards population stabilisation, let alone decrease? Can’t every single person involved with sustainability see that one half of the equation is to reduce the average per-capita usage of energy (by both more frugal practices and better technological efficiencies), and the other half is to at least not allow the number of ‘capitas’ to continuously increase, and preferably examine ways to progressively reduce the number?

Sten, I don’t think algal farms would be CO2 sinks. They would CO2 neutral.

The reason not more work has been done on this is quite logical.
The Americans did a lot of work on it in the mid 90s. Then the price
of oil dropped back to 10-20$ a barrel in the late 90s. Venture capital will invest in all these things once its certain that the price of oil will stay high and not collapse again.

Ludwig, you are correct about human population. We keep adding about 80 million a year to the planet. Most thinking people can see it,
but with the fanatical Catholic lobby to deal with, its a tough
one. The tentacles of the Vatican spread far and wide around the world in political circles...

Sten - thanks for commenting. It is great when the author responds to the comments. If you could supply the CO2 cheaply it might be a sink but it is not likely to be easy to get the CO2 mixed in on a 10,000 ha site. Good Luck though and please keep us up to date on how things work out.

Ludwig and Yabby - My cynical friends say nobody every made a buck stabilising the population, but there are loads of bucks to be made increasing your markets. Is it that simple?

Yes Ericc I think you are basically right about market forces and profit motives, which have pervaded our society to such an extent that we have been brainwashed into thinking that continuous growth is essential. And Yabby is right about the reach of the Vatican and religious / socio-cultural forces per se around the world.

But neither of these should for one moment prevent all those thinking people, who are right into peak oil, finding alternative energy sources and refining technologies, from seeing the enormity of the population factor…. and putting part of their energies toward it

Ludwig wrote: “We should strive to see that the number of people is stabilized in the first instance and that policies to convert population growth into population decrease are implemented. This whole aspect is going to be as important as reducing overall resource consumption and improving efficiencies in resource usage.”

I absolutely agree! If the “early peakers” are correct and we are about to head into a permanent oil crisis, we urgently revisit the old formulae of “resource / people = lifestyle”.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that barring some miraculous technological breakthrough, no renewable energy source can be scaled up to run society the way we are running it. Alternatives to oil have questions of volumes, energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI), intermittent supply (seasonal considerations or the sun not shining at night), and the sheer cost.

Alternatives cannot economically be scaled up to run what we are running — one example is that a so-called “Hydrogen economy” based on solar energy hydrogen (as opposed to gas to hydrogen systems) would bankrupt any nation. Even the Hirsch report to the US Department of energy has concluded that it would take 20 years to wean society off oil, and that is onto other depleting resources such as gas to liquids programs and coal liquefaction! (Download the Hirsch report at my home page at http://www.eclipsenow.org)

Peter Newman also refers to 20 years on ABC’s Catalyst, “The Real Oil Crisis”,
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1515141.htm

“Peter Newman: This is a transition that can’t be done overnight. Hydrogen technology is being developed but it’s a 20 year program.
Jonica Newby, Reporter: Twenty years?
Peter Newman: Yeah, the next 20 years are an absolute critical point where I don’t know that we can make it. I just feel we haven’t started soon enough.”

We need to reduce our overall consumption of oil as transport energy. And this means one thing: we need to redesign our lifestyles around less energy. We need walking distance communities based around massively upgraded public transport infrastructure. Do we have the time and political willpower to do it?