Seriously. What else are you going to call it?
On one side of the aisle, if it doesn’t make money or oil…they just don’t care. On the other side of the aisle, if it isn’t about green energy and save the planet… they just don’t care. Here we are standing in between them screaming….
Today I am not even going to talk about all the awesome greenness of it. I have written about 30 articles about that….so check those out or wait a couple days. I am sure to hit that subject again.
Newp. Todays article is 100% about money.
Money currently being wasted.
Money being sent to sea, where it costs us more money.
It’s enough to make Jamie Dimon cry a little, and be pissy to his friends.
Because it is a lot of money.
Without considering the potential for mineral extraction (which I think is high); just two nutrients amount to $1.77 billion dollars washed out to sea every year. Nitrates, to the tune of $1.55 and phosphorous at around $224 million. (based on 1500 metric kilotons n and 140 metric kilotons phosphorous estimated run off Mississippi river per annum)
In addition to that $1.77 billion dollar loss, according to NOAA those nutrients then cause a major algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico that costs another $82 million dollars annually in fishing and tourism. At this rate we may as well call it $2 billion if we don’t care about the amount.
Oh we do care.
Yeah, $2 billion dollars lost every year is kind of wild. Especially when we can see a way to harvest that $2 billion dollars with River Refugium Projects. The smallest profitable version would cost a half million dollars to get started… and it would grow its own economy while it started cleaning the river.
But if you want to really get in the game and use it to produce fuel, and harvest the chemicals that we are mining other places to get then we build the larger system with hydro thermal liquification and carbonization plants. The only downside here is this is a high investment move. Half a billion dollars to set it up properly…maybe a little more. On the other hand a facility like that could handle a mid sized cities waste treatment along with the river cleaning. It would carry its own weight.
Still it is a high price.
So the question becomes, if you could invest $500 million now, to start recapturing a $2 billion annual loss AND build other profitable industries in economically depressed regions….you would want to do that.
I am understanding how profit works…right?
I was just wondering. RRP