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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Colorado is experimenting with burning this stuff to create electricity and "biochar", which they then want to bury in defunct-but-uncapped oil wells, keeping it out of the air for potentially thousands of years. We could grow all this, then burn it, then bury the pollution. Also, it can be used for animal feed. A small amount of seaweed added to a cow's diet massively reduces the amount of methane they sell. Lots of options here, and it would be a waste of money to just... not use the seaweed for anything

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> A small amount of seaweed added to a cow's diet massively reduces the amount of methane they sell.

Beggar thy heifer!

The biochar can be very useful to add to farm land, prairie soil that has become more basic (saltier) especially due to lower water tables. Shipping spreading costs a factor.

> A small amount of seaweed added to a cow's diet massively reduces the amount of methane they sell

According to another thread, not so massive:

> roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34842167

I consider that to be pretty massive, since methane is an extremely aggressive greenhouse gas, but I apologize if I made it seem like it was 60% or 80% or something like that

This is all just a scam run by Big Cow to get some tasty Asian flavors in the trough.

Yep. I remember doing the math when this info first came out years ago and seaweed production would have to scale astronomically to add an appropriate amount to reduce all cattle feed.

Granted, any reduction is good, but talking like seaweed is the pariah that will make cattle farming environmentally sound wont happen.

I did some napkin math, and it doesn’t seem too feasible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713552

The TL;DR was: in order to supply 1.5 billion cows with the seaweed we might need up to 291.000 metric tons of algae 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

I should have added “/s”

I think you may have meant “panacea.” “Pariah” means an outcast, like an embarrassing family member.

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