SBIR-STTR Award

This project aims to identify and prove the feasibility of innovative, commercial-scale systems and methods for the cultivation of macroalgae on the high seas. The project team will achieve this goal by identifying candidate areas of the US EEZ that provide favorable conditions for industrial-scale macroalgae production and determine the environmental conditions in those areas that drive system design. We will then identify suitable macroalgae species and estimate their achievable culture density and growth rates. This information will guide our design of affordable and survivable systems that will enable the production of algal biomass in sufficient quantities to support biofuel production and carbon sequestration. We will test the most promising system at model scale in a wave basin to determine mooring tensions and internal forces under various combinations of currents and waves. These tests will also determine the structural adequacy of the system. Based on our wave basin finding, estimates of system costs, biomass capacity and growth rates, an economic analysis will be performed to determine the system’s commercial potential

This project continues our development of innovative systems for farming macroalgae on the high seas. We will identify suitable sites in Nantucket Sound to demonstrate our system and determine the associated environmental parameters including depths, currents, and waves. By combining that information with load and acceleration data from our Phase I wave-basin tests, we will refine the structural details of a two-transverse-truss array for fabrication and deployment. This 33m x 67m, instrumented, array in will support 36 seeded longlines of sugar kelp, Saccharina latissimi. We will monitor the performance of the system and the growth of the kelp at variable longline spacing from November 2017 to May 2018. We will harvest the kelp and determine optimal longline spacing based on the goal of maximizing production per unit area. A second season of kelp farming will then be used to measure optimized growth per unit area. Using data collected from these instrumented sea trials, we will design a 100m x 200m array that supports the culture of 2 ha of macroalgae longlines. Based on the projected system cost and the productivity of our test crops, we will refine our profit/loss models for 2 ha array modules and refine our business plan.