Closing the Gap in Renewable Energy – the Next 80%?

By Sergey Nuzhdin, Kristen Davis, Meredith Brooks, Ann Carpenter, Pierre Wensel, Cindy Wilcox, all from the Cluster for Sustainable Seaweed Solutions (CS³)

Special to The Digest

A rising human population coupled with the damaging effects of climate change pose a paramount challenge to producing more resources in an increasingly variable climate. As the agricultural “Green Revolution” provided the foundational resources for the worldwide population increase of the 20th century by focusing on superior breeds of crops and innovative farming technology, a similar marine “Blue Revolution” is the potential key to meet global demand for biofuel, feed, and food security in an environmentally friendly way, without the requirements for fresh water, land and artificial fertilizers.

More feedstock is needed

Approximately 80% of U.S. domestic energy consumption originates from fossil fuels (eia.gov). We thank the many industry leaders in agriculture, solar, wind, and hydropower that helped convert the economy to ~20% renewable energy and to everyone continuing to make progress. One of the many challenges in closing the remaining gap is that land covers only 29% of the Earth, and in many areas, its use is highly contested. Some renewable energy sources have low energy density and are therefore land-intensive. To replace the remaining 80% of fossil fuels, the U.S. and other countries need to look to the oceans to produce abundant, affordable biomass feedstock to replace fossil fuels.

ARPA-E funds research

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy, Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) recognized the oceans as an opportunity and funded competing and complimentary macroalgal projects under the MARINER Program. (MARINER: Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources.) The goal of MARINER is “to develop tools allowing the U.S. to become a world leader in marine biomass production for multiple important applications, including the production of biofuels.”

A number of research groups and companies in Southern California have emerged from the MARINER program. These and others are joining a proposed technology Cluster with a focus on Sustainable Seaweed Solutions (CS³), led by the University of California, Irvine.  The CS³ mission is to carry out critical, industry-driven research and development on seaweed aquaculture with an overall vision of facilitating the expansion of seaweed and seaweed-based products in the U.S.

The U.S. can compete in the global seaweed industry to produce feedstock

Global production of macroalgae (seaweed) has tripled to more than 32 million tons over a decade, with China and Indonesia dominating the market, and aquaculture contributing more than 97%. About a third of farmed seaweed is consumed directly as food and/or feed. The remainder is processed into polysaccharide hydrocolloid, functional products for nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics, and to a lesser extent as fertilizers, feed ingredients, biofuels, and bioplastics.

Agriculture has been improved and intensified over 10,000 years, with billions of dollars invested yearly for development of new engineering and biological solutions. Large agricultural companies and agricultural-focused academic and non-profit institutions enjoy substantial research resources and talent. In contrast, aquaculture companies are typically small and their R&D abilities are severely limited by a lack of funding and timely permits. Smaller aquaculture operations don’t typically have computational resources to optimize farm designs, or breeding and genomic facilities to develop superior competitive crops.

Developing, derisking, and documenting competitive farming practices will continue to be an important R&D domain. Permitting requirements need to be addressed since regulatory agencies, stakeholders and the public demand damage-free approaches to aquaculture. Furthermore, cascade biorefineries need to be designed, scaled, and tested to fractionate macroalgal biomass into various products. While the interest of large companies could be significant, aquaculture research is currently carried out in disparate, disconnected research groups. To consolidate this fragmented R&D space, CS³ is centralizing macroalgal aquaculture R&D to make talent and technology resources available to large-stake investors.

Increasing domestic macroalgae production will add to the over $1.5 billion that aquaculture currently contributes to the U.S. economy. (USDA Aquaculture Census, 2018), with no additional competition for land or fresh water. Equally important, the seaweed aquaculture presents new job opportunities in coastal communities, especially areas with fishing expertise.

The participants in CS³ have a strong history of partnership on the research and development of macroalgae aquaculture, in large part due to collaborative efforts initiated by the series of ARPA-E awards made through the MARINER Program. As part of the ARPA-E MARINER program Dr. Kristen Davis (UCI) received a $2M grant and worked with Dr. Christina Frieder (Southern California Coastal Water Research Project), Dr. Jim McWilliams (UCLA), and Dr. Marcelo Chamecki (UCLA) to develop the MACMODS model to site seaweed farms, optimize their design, and predict environmental feedbacks. Dr. Davis also has ongoing work with Ocean Rainforest, Inc. to both model and observe a pilot M. pyrifera farm near Santa Barbara, California.University of Southern California (USC) has been a recipient of funds via two active ARPA-E awards ($9M). One award with Marine BioEnergy successfully tested depth-cycling Giant Kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) for nutrients in deep water which will launch open ocean farms towed by drone submarines. The research resulted in a journal article. USC is participating in another award to domesticate Giant Kelp. USC Professor, Dr. Nuzhdin and Holdfast, LLC are co-developing aquaculture breeding and seed facilities at AltaSea in San Pedro, California.

Seaweed Farms Benefit the Environment

Large-scale macroalgal production is being examined by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as NGOs (e.g. ClimateWorks, Oceans 2050) as an ocean-based strategy for carbon sequestration, but there remain uncertainties in the science and more research is needed on sinking kelp as a sequestration option. Whether or not seaweed is sequestered, seaweed aquaculture offers immediateregenerative and bio-extractive benefits to the environment by absorbing excess nutrients and/or pollutants from the ocean ecosystem which improves water quality. Ecosystem services may be the primary aim of a seaweed farm, or it can be an ancillary goal for a commercial farm.

First Customers and Products for Seaweed

First customers for farmed Giant Kelp include CR&R, Inc, a waste management company with one of the largest biomass digesters on the West Coast. CR&R currently processes lawn/garden cuttings and food waste into biogas to fuel their trash fleet. The biogas replaces diesel. They do not have enough feedstock to fuel their entire fleet and have signed a letter of intent to purchase Giant Kelp to make biogas to inject in the regional pipeline to fuel their fleet at various locations. And in bench-scale testing, Giant Kelp tested 5% better per ton than the current feedstocks. Eventually, the excess biogas will be seamlessly available to all customers on the pipeline, including the spinning generators that power the grid on days of low wind and low sun. Once the pipeline is 100% biogas, the users will be powered by renewable fuels.

Despite its lack of recalcitrant lignin, the high ash and water content of macroalgae makes it uniquely challenging to process. Working with teams at Washington State University and Arizona State University, Spira, Inc. has designed and developed dry and wet thermochemical conversion processes and integrated these with biochemical extractive processes to valorize macroalgal biomass. This involves using novel solvents and pre-treatments, torrefaction, anaerobic digestion, fermentation, and cost-effective, sequential hydrothermal liquefication (SeqHTL) to first isolate valuable co-products before producing bio-crude which can be hydrotreated, upgraded, and blended into aviation fuel.  Spira, Inc. has also patented bioreactor technology that can be configured with macroalgal cultivation systems for the capture and conversion of atmospheric and/or point-emission CO₂ into more soluble, transportable, and storable aqueous bicarbonate. Marine BioEnergy estimates that 220,000 km² of Giant Kelp under cultivation are required to replace 10% of liquid fuels consumed in the U.S. today.  That is an area the size of the State of Utah. There is space in the Pacific Ocean for 705 “Utahs”.

Primary Ocean has indicated interest in purchasing additional Giant Kelp to produce their current product, Organikelp, a bio-stimulant demonstrated to improve the plant and soil health of diverse U.S. crops like strawberries in Ventura, California and citrus trees in Florida. Primary Ocean has also conducted successful commercial trials on other crops such as cannabis, parsley, rosemary, bordeaux basil, and potatoes and is working to scale the usage of Organikelp to over 100,000,000 acres. Organikelp meets the needs of farmers by reducing the requirements for water while increasing the nutrient density of crops and the health of soil. Reducing artificial chemicals also reduces the related impact on farm workers and people worldwide.

As long lines of the red seaweed, Asparagopsis taxiformis, become available, Southern California ocean farms can produce the thousands of tons needed to provide organic supplement for cattle feed. Cows eat 100-150 lbs of feed per cow per day and less than 5% replacement with the red seaweed will reduce the methane produced by ~99%. (Laced with molasses so the cows will eat the seaweed!)

The Blue Revolution is Coming

Fully deployed, regenerative seaweed farms have the potential to deliver millions of tons of feedstock and billions of dollars of value in terms of domestic production and ecosystem services – and will create a Blue Revolution, analogous to the Green Revolution of the last century.

Members of the Cluster for Sustainable Seaweed Solutions (CS³):

University Research Groups:

University of California, Irvine            Dr. Kristen Davis                    Modeling, Farm Engineering

University of California, Irvine            Dr. Steven Davis                    Earth System Science

University of Southern California       Dr. Sergey Nuzhdin                Molecular Biology

University of Southern California       Dr. Robin Kundis Craig           Ocean & Coastal Law

Washington State University              Dr. Shulin Chen                      Thermochemical Conversion

Washington State University              Dr. Manuel Garcia-Pérez        Thermochemical Conversion

Washington State University              Dr. Liang Yu                            AD and Fermentation

Industry:

Marine BioEnergy, Inc            Open-ocean farming                           Cindy Wilcox

Ocean Rainforest, Inc             Nursery and farming                           Javier Infante

Santa Barbara Mariculture     Farmer                                                Bernard Friedman

Carlsbad Aquafarms               Farmer                                                 Thomas Grimm

Sunken Seaweed, LLC           Farmer                                                 Leslie Booher

Blue Evolution, Inc.                 Farmer                                                 Beau Perry

Braid Theory, Inc.                   Blue Economy Accelerator                 Ann Carpenter

Holdfast, LLC                          BioExtractive farming                         Diane Kim

SeedsOffShore, LLC              Spatial and genomic informatics        Nina Noujdina
Spira, Inc                                 BioExtraction and CO₂ Capture         Pierre Wensel

Primary Ocean                        Bio-stimulants                                     Brandon Barney

Non-Profits:  

AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles                                                    Meredith Brooks

Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP)    Martha Sutula

 

This article was co-authored by this team from the Cluster for Sustainable Seaweed Solutions (CS³):

Sergey Nuzhdin, Professor, University of Southern California

Kristen Davis, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine

Meredith Brooks, AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles  

Ann Carpenter, Co-Founder/CEO, Braid Theory, Inc.

Pierre Wensel, Chief Science Officer/Founder, Spira, Inc. 

Cindy Wilcox, President/Co-Founder, Marine BioEnergy, Inc.