Macroalgal Cultivation

[Andrew Lockley]

https://oceancdr.net/forum/XXXKB8hQcauFLwP2JNta

Macroalgal Cultivation

Funding

Technology

Sarah Cooley

Director of Climate Science

Feb 25, 2021

Blog post, Rod Fujita at EDF

Rod studied seaweed aquaculture in the 70s and has some good research recommendations on what it would take to make it part of a climate solution. http://blogs.edf.org/edfish/2021/02/23/seaweeds-to-the-rescue-redux/

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Antonius Gagern

Feb 26, 2021

Thanks @Sarah Cooley, great blog post. Rod's main point is this: "For seaweed restoration and farming to become an important part of the carbon drawdown solution, we need more science to accurately quantify how much carbon specific restoration and farming projects will draw down and sequester, which will depend greatly on context and design."

There are a few ongoing projects that do exactly that.

@Steven J Davis, @Kristen A Davis, @Benjamin Saenz and Christina Frieder at UCI are building an LCA model that combines a spatially explicit biophysical growth module with cost and value modules (disaggregated into growth techniques and different pathways, including sinking as one of the pathways). This model will allow users to play around with input assumptions and explore profitability (and hence growth and drawdown potential) of various supply chains.

Oceans2050 (with Carlos Duarte) is coordinating a research effort of 20+ seaweed farms around the world to estimate how much of the fixated carbon in seaweed is permanently sequestered due sloughing of seaweed during growth (pre-harvest).

Darcy Bradley and colleagues at UCSB have been working on seaweed LCA and bioeconomic feasibility studies (yet unpublished to my knowledge).

@Jeff Zerger and @Nico Julian at Phykos, as well as https://www.runningtide.com/ are exploring economically viable pathways to grow and sink seaweed, which is fundamentally a carbon market/negative emissions market play and requires solid estimates of rate, scale and permanence of sequestration

@Nichole N Price, @Aurora M Ricart and colleagues at Bigelow Laboratory have been working for some time on seaweed from an ocean health and carbon drawdown perspective, currently with support from WWF (through the Bezos Earth fund which is shaping up to be a major contributor to research in this field).

@Jean-Baptiste Thomas and colleagues at Seafarm.se grow and use macroalgae for various purposes in a closed loop system that produces zero waste. A strong LCA component is part of this work. See here: https://oceancdr.net/forum/MdblYhEwF7oHvyOj6kyw

Geoff Chapin, @Brian von Herzen, Ph.D. and colleagues at https://www.c-combinator.com/ have been exploring commercially viable applications to the millions of tons of free floating sargassum that has been plaguing beaches in the Caribbean for over a decade now. Their work has a strong LCA component, too, and is now expanding beyond beach cleanup and into permaculture.

@Samantha Deane and colleagues at Kelp Blue are restoring giant kelp forests and use the harvest of the forest canopy to produce sustainable agri-foods (animal feed and biostimulants), textiles, pharmaceuticals and bioplastics. Kelp Blue is also working on LCA aspects for all major product pathways.

And there are many more out there, please add them to this thread. I agree that there's a huge need to quickly come to more of a consensus on the potential and limitations of seaweed as a CDR mechanism and to identify the policy and governance barriers that slow down the beneficial deployment of seaweed.

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Fiona Trappe

Feb 26, 2021

Hi There - great to see these posts re seaweed role in climate mitigation

We founded www.theseaweedalliance.org.uk in 2017 to engage with policy makers (and others) here in UK. In roads are being made. It's slow!

In mid 2020 we formed www.seastheopportunity.co.uk to engage directly with industry (our background is in commercialisation, business and regional development) to actively select seaweed derived compounds to replace carbon intense industry applications AND invest in making seaweed farms and no-harvest farms a reality. We have close alliances with many projects listed