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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

The US produces 912,358 tonnes of corn per day (or 900 million kg). I suspect corn is much easier to grow than seaweed though. Just as a perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...

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That is probably an incorrect assumption. Corn farming requires land, fresh water, and fertilizer - all very expensive. Growing seaweed requires none of those things, only ocean space and a proper farm system.

Mhm... Looking at the numbers again:

291,000 metric tons per day => ~ 106 Million metric tons per year.

In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons [0].

[0]: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5555e.pdf, page 24, table 7

Current production shouldn't matter and the sea is huge - if the algae are uncomplicated to grow I don't see any reason why there should be a limit to future production.

You mean other than the fact that techniques for efficiently growing such amounts of seaweed do not exist? Of the amount produced globally today, 90% comes from China, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines and that production is all very labor intensive and done in locations and using methods that are simply not applicable to the United States.

There is a huge about of R&D needed to get any of this to scale. Some of it is already underway.

Setting aside the difficulty in growing, algae will have the advantage of a continuous growing cycle, as opposed to corn which has a full year's crop harvested in ~25 days.

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