Deliverance from the Dead Zone ( repost from 1-4-13 )

[psst:  Here's a source of hydrogen for fuel cells. I discussed the hydrogen delivery system in the most recent series.]

What's with the title?  What's this Dead Zone stuff, an allusion to a Steven King novel?  Throw in the reference to the Burt Reynolds movie and it looks like a double ripoff.  Yeah, well I have to do something to get your attention.  Very funny.  Ha, ha.  Funnier than a barrel of Congresscritters.

Actually, the title is reference to The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone --- where nothing lives.  The Deliverance part is a proposed solution that is a speculation alert.  Why?  Because I don't know if it will work, or even if it could work, whether or not our corrupt system will actually allow a solution to a problem to be implemented.

The idea is to grow seaweed in the Dead Zone.  Harvest the seaweed and make biofuels out of it.  Eventually, the drop-in biofuels could be converted to hydrogen for fuel cells.  You kill two birds with one stone.  Eliminate the Dead Zone and lick the global warming "problem".  Throw in energy security as a bonus.  What's not to like?  Heck, you could create a lot of jobs and economic growth with this.  Only a Congresscritter could hate it.

Let's look at the Gulf shall we?  First of all, consider its typography---depth of the Gulf of Mexico.  The Dead Zone lies directly offshore on the shallow shelf area.  A good place to put something there if it requires a shallow body of water.  Here's some more info on Gulf of Mexico pollution via Wikipedia.  I figured that since algae already grows there in this Dead Zone, you could substitute the seaweed and force the red tide out of the picture.  Voila!  End of red tides and the Dead Zone.

You would need a massive public works project to implement the idea.  The shelf areas of the Gulf are probably not conducive to the growth of seaweed, so you may have to add something to the shelf that the seaweed can attach to.  That is, seaweed clings to rocks, but the bottom of the Gulf is sandy.  Replace the sand with rocks or something else, like chicken wire perhaps?

You could start small and work your way up.  Perhaps the 8000 square mile area could be divvied up amongst entrepreneurs parcel-by-parcel until the entire Dead Zone is covered in seaweed farms.

This isn't necessarily a novel idea.  They do a lot of this in Asia, as noted in an earlier post.  Here's a few links on the subject that I "dredged up" ( pardon the pun) on the subject.

• Kelp For Farmers: Seaweed Becomes A New Crop In America
• Scientists claim major breakthrough in seaweed biofuel
• The Power of Seaweed