Those arguments make sense, but biomass will not cut emissions (though they might level emissions)
Plants get there carbon out of the air and release it back into the air in equal quantity, that's what 'carbon neutral' means... you can effectively sequester the stuff merely by increasing the amount of biomass on the planet, not just by dumping it back down in holes, which we can also do but in my opinion is needlessly wasting a valuable resource... I'd rather just see the biomass per acre increased in various spots like desert or tundra... but you miss a key point, one can sequester carbon by growing biofuels and simply storing them in cisterns as economic reserves. I'd rather have megatons of biofuel in a bunch of cistern then just dump carbon back into empty mines.
Sure, it would be better to sequester carbon as fuel than just wall it away somewhere never to be seen again, but the "increasing biomass" aspect is what has always bothered me about sequestration: It would take a fairly significant net mass increase to even temporarily reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, and unless we are talking about huge sequoia groves or something, nearly all of it will go back into the atmosphere in a century or two at most. Ironically, the most effective form of carbon sequestration was fossil fuels themselves compactly tucking huge amounts of carbon away where only someone hell bent on digging through a mile of rock to obtain and then burn it could release it. The genie may be out of the bottle on that one; I doubt we can plant enough trees and grow enough algae to offset a few hundred million years of global forests and building sized lizards. I would certainly love to see our deforestation trends reversed, because they exacerbate the problem, and finding a way to farm deserts and tundra to slow the retreat of forests in the relatively few areas where they remain would help that a lot, but carbon neutrality may be the best we can hope for at this stage.
and neither will carbon sequestration unless we plan to bury that excess carbon some place where no microbes can get to it for a few centuries. If we get biomass from space, sunlight and nutrients currently wasted that may be viable (though I am still uncertain that is the most efficient way to exploit those unused resources,) but only then. If biomass cannot rely primarily on resources not currently used I would rather concentrate on making hydrogen fuel cells with fission. That still is not efficient, but would be less inefficient.
I don't think space-based agriculture for terrestrial consumption is likely to be economically viable under any realistic circumstances, even if we never had anything better than solar and had to use space tethers to transport food it is cheaper to move raw electricity and heat... you'd dump power from orbital solar plants down a tether to massive many story hydroponic facilities and purge waste heat right back up those tethers or five mile high heat conducting towers. Theoretically you could pack trillions of people into that sort of setup essentially limited by how much heat you could pump out, and you'd probably be looking at something along the lines of a 100 kilowatts per person, though you could probably dump that down a good deal by only generating in hydroponic facilities the exact right amount of the proper light spectrum for optimal. That heat could only be ultimately radiated away... which is about 500 W/m2 at room temp but presumably one could construct the big orbital solar panels to have a surface area larger than their effective collection cross section of ~ 1300 W/m2 IIRC at this distance from the sun, nice crinkly rear sides, a straight flat panel would doing 1000 W/m2 while absorbing 1300 w/m2 which is no good but one with a pin backside like the heat sink on a processor usually has about 50x the exposed surface area of it's flat equivalent so presumably doing 25,000 W/m2 wouldn't be a problem, but I'm thinking the upper end of conductive heat transfer is around 5000 W/mK... which does happen to come from those same kickass new materials constructed out of carbon that one would tend to build space elevators and many-mile arcologies out of so I'd bet on being able to push out the heat loss to an order of magnitude or more above Earth's own current stabilized hundred petawatt or so amount... so maybe 10 Trillion people? If they all pretty much lived and grew food in ten thousand story buildings you could pretty much use 2% of the Earth's land surface for that with plenty of room for food crops and individual apartments larger than most mansions... pretty far into future to be sure but physically doable by known laws.
Whoa, there!


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Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!

LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
This message last edited by Joel on 22/10/2011 at 08:35:06 AM
Interesting new Biofuel innovation: Magnetic Algae
22/10/2011 03:05:13 AM
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I must be missing something with biofuel, though this certainly sounds like good news for it.
22/10/2011 04:41:17 AM
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It's rather difficult to cram a fission reactor into a car
22/10/2011 05:10:23 AM
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If the batteries are that bulky then, yeah, biomass or something similar is appealing.
22/10/2011 07:15:22 AM
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We're constrained by what economics and tech permit
22/10/2011 08:09:22 AM
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And physics, always physics.
22/10/2011 08:34:07 AM
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And scale... scale is important too
22/10/2011 01:40:18 PM
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True, but sequestrations bottom line is we have to remove more than is released from biomass.
23/10/2011 11:41:20 AM
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I think you're still misunderstanding this concept
23/10/2011 01:26:14 PM
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Um... as stated, biomass creation=B'(t)=/=biomass creation.
23/10/2011 10:46:04 PM
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No, that would be net Biomass increase with time
24/10/2011 07:49:10 AM
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But is not "net biomass increase with time" the same as "biomass creation"?
25/10/2011 02:54:16 AM
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Forget Biofuel. When do we start making magnetic people!
22/10/2011 07:43:43 AM
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One would have problems imagining why
22/10/2011 08:09:55 AM
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Except during the middle of the day, you can usually use the sun.
22/10/2011 08:36:54 AM
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"Why"?! So I could be a Mistborn. "Why" is the least-relevant question. *NM*
22/10/2011 07:56:16 PM
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