Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Ocean Visions has published a new digital roadmap, highlighting pathways industries can take to support decarbonization efforts by utilizing seaweed more often in production processes.
Seaweed aquaculture is already a major global industry when it comes to use in food and hydrocolloids, but Ocean Visions said there is room for further research into seaweed’s potential use in biofuels and biostimulants. According to the copmany these two use cases, "will require significant expansion” in technology investments, as well as processes for cultivating, harvesting, and processing efficiently.
To help facilitate this change, Ocean Visions has rolled out a new roadmap, labeling the newly published framework as "a first-of-its kind digital resource designed to help guide the responsible development and scaling of seaweed-based products" that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across several industries.
Published in early June, the roadmap is available in an interactive dashboard tool that Ocean Visions Chief Scientist David Koweek told SeafoodSource contains a user-friendly interface and can be constantly updated to reflect new information.
"The core idea behind these roadmaps is to facilitate community-driven collective input that identifies all the potential opportunities for seaweed to contribute to a low-carbon economy," Koweek said. "Specifically, we've decided to put these online as living, interactive digital products."
The roadmap divides research efforts into five categories: agricultural uses, biomaterials, critical minerals, food products and animal feed, and biofuels.
"We undertook a very extensive process last year to identify what we call neglected opportunities within the realm of ocean-based decarbonization," Koweek said. "Seaweed-based substitutions to generate low-carbon food, fuel, seed, and other high-value bioproducts came atop that analysis so we began embarking on this process of developing the roadmap."
Ocean Visions Senior Program Officer Nikhil Neelakantan said the key questions the team hoped to answer through that identification process was which seaweed-based products can have a meaningful impact on decarbonization efforts, and what it would take for these products to scale up effectively.
To start, Neelakantan said researchers looked through a list of potential products made with seaweed, and then nine products were identified in which the use of seaweed could help reduce emissions when substituted for fossil fuel-based production materials.
"Some of the source material – the basic research and modeling – show that seaweed can have a significant potential impact of up to 500 million tons of CO2 emissions reduced per year when used in these products and scaled," Neelakantan said.
Neelakantan said the roadmap took about a year to develop. During that time, products were analyzed and rated on mitigation potential, technology readiness, and the size of the market.
In doing so, he said researchers found the largest potential impact seaweed could have would be creating sustainable aviation fuels by 2050; however, he cautioned this use case has “very low readiness,” and the cost of converting seaweed to fuel is currently too high.
But biostimulants, which are products that help increase crop yields, are more ready for adoption and already comprise a USD 1 billion (EUR 879.1 million) market.
WIthin this category, Neelakantan said the roadmap helped researchers discover that emissions could be reduced by about 25 million to 50 million tons of CO2 a year. In Asia alone, the mitigation potential for reducing emissions in the food market could be around 10 million to 20 million tons of CO2 a year through the use of seaweed-based biostimulants.
"We wanted to build this comprehensive source that looks at these various pathways and then also to try and tackle some of these questions," Neelakantan said. "Challenges, particularly for areas like biofuels, were in the areas of science and engineering. This seemed less the case for something like offshore wind where the challenges are really on policy and finance and with a lot of the technology being pretty ironed out at this point."
Though the science of seaweed aquaculture is advanced, the problem of scaling exists, even as efforts to do so continue to arise.
"We've seen this when it comes to these products, scaling these products that have climate impact," Neelakantan said. "You need a lot of seaweed to have this climate impact, and you need seaweed at low cost. There's this chicken and egg problem here where the cost of seaweed is too high, these products aren't developed, and the products and the demand isn't there because of the cost being so high. So, one of the areas that we want to address is bringing down the cost of offshore cultivation."
Neelakantan said he hoped the research would help innovators plainly see the challenges in the current seaweed decarbonization space and help work with policymakers to address regulatory barriers. Additionally, through a focus on positive environmental benefits, instead of just on overcoming barriers, he said his motivation was to draw the attention of philanthropic funders and biotechnology companies with investors.
The roadmap was developed with help from an advisory board, which included Xiamen University Associate Professor Ling Cao, Hatch Blue Project Advisor and Seaweed Specialist Peter Green, former Environmental Defense Fund Lead Senior Scientist Rob Fujita, and Wetstone Head of Environmental Sensing Simon Freeman.
Once created, Neelakantan said the roadmap was opened for public comment in May, and the team of researchers reached out to "a number of experts," including in markets where seaweed could play a vital role. About 100 comments were submitted during the public comment period, and Neelakantan said the overwhelming majority commented on how this product was the first of its kind in the seaweed space.
"We've received feedback from people who have worked in the past on cultivation and some of these areas interested in partnering with us," Neelakantan said. "We've also received interest from policymakers and people at NOAA about the roadmap and using it for their programs."
The roadmap, according to Koweek, aligns with Ocean Visions' four-step program for ocean climate mitigation.
The first step, Reduce, focuses on "pathways to advance the research and development of marine carbon dioxide removal," Koweek said. Remove is the second part, which includes large-scale carbon dioxide removal methods in the world’s oceans. The third step, Repair, focuses on pathways for prolonging the health of marine climates. The fourth and final step called Reach focuses on increasing global participation through conversations, case studies, and webinars.
"I'm really proud of the collective effort," Koweek said. "I'm proud of what it means for the program within Ocean Visions, and I'm proud of what it means as an organization and our ability to make an impact in the world."
