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Marine phytoplankton is a collective name for the smallest water plants on earth with a size of about a few 1/1000ths of a millimetre. They are the basis of the food web of all life in our oceans. Phytoplankton doesn't need to eat to survive. Rather, they synthesize themselves out of elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide. As long as there is life on earth, these elements will be available – just like their energy source, sunlight, without which phytoplankton cannot live. Giving off oxygen as waste product and generating freshwater while they are dried, and counteracting global climate change by consuming carbon dioxide, it is easy to acknowledge calling these important organisms our only sustainable solar global engine. All nutrient and lighting requirements being met, they can easily double their biomass every day. And since we have a reactor technology where all growth requirements can be met, it is possible to let this ongoing production cycle take place outside the ocean, even independent of the ocean. To put it simply, once such a reactor has been inoculated with a minute amount of a given phytoplankton strain, it is possible to maintain a production rate of this new resource week after week, month after month. On an industrial production scale, the activity shall turn deserts green; induce a change of paradigm to produce new global resources, and shall sustain a further peaceful development of mankind. Marine phytoplankton is an absolute sustainable resource. Does it look like a miracle? It shouldn't. It's nature. „Human beings are carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be produced in the future. Within a few centuries, we are returning to the atmosphere and the oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of million years.” Revelle, 1957. „The activity of photosynthetic micro-organisms largely contributed to the built-up of fossil fuels due to the uptake of atmospheric CO 2 . The release of fossil CO 2 into the atmosphere served to allow humanity to develop nations, sciences, and industries. The same human ingenuity and the same photosynthetic organisms are now needed to process harmful CO 2 emission not only into harmless systems. What is more important, they will generate a hitherto unexpressed potential of renewable and environmental safe resources, both as energy and material resources, based on phytoplankton biomass. The same mechanisms that control the material fluxes of the earth will now allow a novel, global industrial, this time sustainable, development. Think small, act large. That's safe ®evolution”. Saide & Bernd Kroon, 2004. |
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