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.
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.