Ask HN: What problems don't have a profitable business solution?

Re:Ask HN: What problems don't have a profitable business so... by eesmith on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @06:01PM (#15918518)

Thank you for your patience with me. Your comments were quite informative. I'm now well beyond the point where I can make even somewhat relevant questions, much less comments. :)

EDIT: Oh, wait, I do have one more question. In order for this to be an effective form of carbon reduction, how much will the fish population increase? As the supply goes up, the prices will go down, and I'm still not convinced that the amount of carbon capture needed is economically justified by the increase in fish supply.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What problems don't have a profitable business so... by danieltillett on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @09:54PM (#15919606)

This is a rather hard question to answer as it would depend on how elastic demand is for fish and how efficiently the phosphate is converted to fish.

You could choose to run the whole operation semi-inefficiently where you chose to only catch and sell a portion of the fish, or use the fish as feed for other higher value fish like salmon and bluefin tuna.

My minor contribution to the idea was to workout that you don’t need purified phosphate to fertilise the oceans. We could just use phosphate rich rock to make a slow release pumice-like fertiliser that floats on the surface (using a photo-degradable polymer). This gets the phosphate cost down from around US$1600/t to something under $50/t. I wrote a paper on this many years ago, but I never got around to publishing it. I might try and turn it into a blog post if I get a chance.

[ Parent | on HN ]