Seaweed to the Rescue!

Always on the look out for the next good thing that will rescue us from the last bad thing I ran across this article about the potential of seaweed to be a bio-fuel to replace, in some part, our thirst for fossil fuels.  Having a brother in on an exciting beta-test of a related effort sharpens my interest.

“Many millions of [dollars] are being invested in seaweed research from Vietnam to Israel to Chile because producing biofuels in the sea removes at a stroke many of the serious problems with conventional biofuels. Though important as greener alternatives to oil, many biofuels are produced from food crops, such as corn and sugar, which drives up global prices in a world where a billion people are already hungry. Biofuel production also consumes increasingly scarce freshwater and the worst examples — those from palm oil — can produce more carbon dioxide than diesel.

“Seaweed does not have any of those problems,” says Phil Kerrison, another marine scientist, back at the Sams labs. Seaweed farming has even been shown to clean up the pollution from fish farms and kelp grows far more quickly than land plants, turning sunlight into chemical energy five times more efficiently.”