Project Description
The Ocean Era team will lead a MARINER Category 1 project to design and develop technologies to deliver deep seawater nutrients to a novel macroalgae production farm concept suitable for deployment in tropical and subtropical deep ocean environments. The superstructure of macroalgae farms typically consists of an anchor grid that tethers the farm in a fixed location and orientation. The Kampachi Farms team aims to disrupt this model by designing a macroalgae array anchored by a single-point mooring, or anchor point. Single-point mooring will allow the farm to align itself with the current, drastically reducing stress loads and improving the efficiency of nutrient dispersal. Additionally, the team has proposed a low-cost upwelling system to deliver nutrients from deeper waters to the macroalgae farm above to solve the issue of low nutrient content surface waters that would slow macroalgae growth. Since the nutrients will always flow downcurrent, and the farm self-aligns itself in that direction, the upwelled nutrients will be more efficiently dispersed across the array. The team believes that these elements, when tested and refined together, can reduce the capital and operating cost of macroalgae cultivation, while increasing the range of deployment into a large swath of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone that is currently inhospitable to commercial macroalgae cultivation because of the high costs to moor arrays and the lack of nutrients in surface waters.
View Ocean Era's Meeting Slides
Contact
PI: Neil Sims; neil@ocean-era.com
Team Members
Makai Ocean Engineering, UCI, University of Hawaii Hilo