[Terrapreta] Feedstock source?? Where??

[rukurt at westnet.com.au]

One of the things that bothers me about remediating Global Warming is 
the question of where is all that biomass going to come from? It's 
simple enough to say that waste crop residues will do it. No they won't, 
there is nowhere enough of that available. Besides, the soil also needs 
organic matter to be added to it to feed all those wee beasties that the 
charcoal will be providing tenements for. You can't just grow crops in 
soil containing nothing but charcoal as an amendment.
 Stuff is going to have to be grown on purpose to do it. And coppicing 
all the forests in the world isn't likely to do it either. For a start 
the Conservationists aren't going to let us do that.
There may well be an answer. Over in the "Oil from Algae" list they 
actually claim to eventually be able to take all the CO2 from a power 
house exhaust stack, run it into algae growing bio-reactors and turn it 
all into oil producing algae. The resultant oil can then be turned into 
bio diesel and there you are. The remaining oilpress cake can be fed to 
animals, used as fertiliser you name it. This will allegedly be better 
than liquifying all that CO2 and pumping it underground or into the deep 
sea, but I don't quite see it that way. I see the CO2 coming out of the 
diesel exhausts containing the same carbon as was mined in the first 
place. That concept got a very negative reception over there.
HOWEVER!!! Growing oil producing algae is a bit difficult and finicky, 
the cultures tend to get infected with algae from the environment. So 
growing just any old algae might be a better way to produce biomass. The 
potential yields are tremendous, one can dry the resultant algae and 
pyrolise them into charcoal which one can then bury, thereby getting rid 
of that carbon for eons. If one is growing them on CO2 from the 
powerhouses stacks one could simply feed it all back into the powerhouse 
and cut out the mining entirely. The energy for all this comes from 
sunlight of course. And of course, there is no need to use stackgas, the 
air, anywhere contains CO2. Neither does one need complicated highcost 
bio re-actors. Shallow ponds will do just as well.
I don't know how effective algae charcoal will be for terrapreta, but 
that is still to be seen.
Another point---- ever seen a loaded coal train go by, seems to take 
hours of big fat cars, stuffed with coal going by. Every bit of that 
carbon will have to be turned into biomass charcoal and buried to get 
rid of the CO2. And consider those huge tankers presently carrying oil 
to your shores. Same story. Every bit of that carbon will have to be 
sucked back out of the atmosphere and re-buried. A mindboggling prospect.

Kurt