Challenge with the Black Sea
The Radovna River (pictured) flows into Slovenia’s longest river, the Soča , which makes its way southeast through Bosnia & Herzegovina into Serbia, where it meets the Danube in Belgrade and flows south into the Black Sea.
Over the years, the Black Sea has been building up ever-increasing concentrations of noxious materials, one of which is hydrogen sulfide, H2S, which, as we remember from our childhood chemistry sets, can be made by combusting sulfur and candle wax, an experiment best conducted outdoors, because the resulting gas smells like rotten eggs.
This calls to mind the very business plan submitted to 2GreenEnergy for funding consideration, in late 2009. The proposal: process the hydrogen sulfide in the Black Sea, using chemistry that separates the hydrogen from the sulfur, ridding Eastern Europe and the other surrounding lands of its problem, and then selling both commodities.
Is this theoretically impossible? Not at all, though I never actually studied the specific chemistry to learn how deeply endothermic the reaction must be, i.e., how much energy, that has to come from somewhere, is required to make the reaction occur.
Is it feasible? I can’t possibly imagine so. There are 25 tons of gold in a cubic mile of seawater, ~$900 million in today’s market. The problem is that it would cost far more than that to recover the gold. The Black Sea proposal make this one look like a piece of cake.
Craig,
The Danube delta and other rivers, lakes, landfill etc in Eastern Europe are an environmental disaster zone.
The pollution is a legacy of half a century of failed socialist politics and economics. The task of cleaning up and mitigating the damage is vast and the logistics of any solutions overwhelms to relatively impoverished economic resources of Eastern European nations, struggling with increasingly uneconomic EU restrictions.
Responsibility across many jurisdictions for river pollution is a difficult concept for Americans to understand.
The Danube originates in Germany and flows for 2,850 km southeast to the black sea. Along the way the Danube is fed by more than 70 rivers and tributaries, from more than 15 nations.
The Danube runs through, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine before draining into the Black Sea.
The Danube drainage basin includes countries such as Albania,
Austria,Bosnia and Herzegovina,Bulgaria,Croatia,Czech Republic,Germany, Hungary, Italy, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia. Slovak Republic of Macedonia,Slovenia
Switzerland and Ukraine.
In 1998, the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) was formed, but in the intervening years despite crating a considerable bureaucracy and holding endless conferences and talk fests, very little of any practical value has been accomplished.
Water from the Danube is undrinkable, and even identifying the ongoing pollution is made more difficult because with the collapse of the socialist regimes, the old industrial sites and dumps were just abandoned. Records, and even locations of the sites are now lost or been destroyed. There are literally tens of thousands of sites with a vast range of pollutants.
Very little work is being done to identify or address these site, in one case an entire suburb has been built over an old Soviet facility with is contaminated by a vast range of toxic substances.
Especially annoying, is the total effrontery of the Western socialist-left to accept any responsibility for the level of pollution created by regimes they once held as shinning examples of environmental utopia!
Now the same socialist/green left berate the “capitalist’ West to clean up the vast mess their fellow travelers created.
The scale of pollution is vast, overwhelming in complexity and simplistic little solutions such as the one you propose are evidence of a total lack of understanding of the size or scale of the problem.