Transportation

The Catalina Sea Ranch team will lead a MARINER Category 1 project to design an advanced giant kelp cultivation system for deployment on open ocean sites to assess their ability to produce economical and sustainable biomass for a future biofuels industry. The team plans to develop solutions to the main challenges facing macroalgae cultivation: scalability of seeding, cultivation, and harvest; survivability of the offshore installations; energy use and ecosystem impact; predictability of yield and quality of harvested biomass; and cost effectiveness.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will lead a MARINER Category 4 project to develop an autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) system for monitoring large-scale seaweed farms for extended periods. Compared to more costly human labor and boat operations, UUV systems present an attractive option for consistent, daily monitoring of large-scale, offshore seaweed farms. The system will routinely survey and quantify key parameters such as infrastructure health, macroalgae growth rate, and nutrient content of the water.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution leads a MARINER Category 5 project, to develop a selective breeding program for sugar kelp, Saccharina latissima, one of the most commercially important kelp varieties. The goal of the project is to improve productivity and cost effectiveness of seaweed farming. The breeding program will build a germplasm library associated with plants that produce a 20% to 30% yield improvement over plants currently in the field.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) will lead a MARINER Category 5 project to develop a breeding program and enable the development of macroalgae varieties that consistently produce high yields under farmed conditions. Controlled genetic improvements through crop breeding require establishing a bank of genetically homogeneous lines that are examined for markers and traits important for domestication and production. The researchers will sample giant sea kelp from the Southern California Bight, an area of high genetic diversity.

The University of New England (UNE) will lead a MARINER Category 3 project to develop a high-resolution, 3D computational modeling tool for simulating hydrodynamic forces on macroalgae cultivation and harvest systems. Advanced modeling tools can help inform decisions about farm structure and the significant capital investment required. UNE’s modeling tool will quantify fluid dynamics and mechanical stress at the sub-meter level.

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) will lead a MARINER Category 4 project to develop a system-level solution to continuously monitor all stages of seaweed biomass production. To maximize biomass yields and minimize risk, farm managers must be able to monitor farm progress starting at seaweed outplanting and continuing through the growth cycle to harvest.

The team led by Marine BioEnergy will develop an open ocean cultivation system for macroalgae biomass, which can be converted to biocrude. Giant kelp is one of the fastest growing sources of biomass, and the open ocean surface water is an immense, untapped region for growing kelp. However, kelp does not grow in the open ocean because it needs to attach to a hard surface, typically less than 40 meters deep. Kelp also needs nutrients that are only available in deep water or near shore but not on the surface of the open ocean.

Ocean Rainforest will use a comprehensive experimental approach to optimize the design of their novel giant kelp cultivation system. The team will conduct tests in the open ocean of several variables, including depth and length of grow lines, seeding methods, and harvest frequency. Using an array of experiments that build on themselves each year, the team will evaluate the feasibility of their cultivation system to maximize biomass production. The project team will also test several hatchery techniques to improve seeding efficiency.

PolyPlus Battery Company, in collaboration with SCHOTT Glass, will develop flexible, solid-electrolyte-protected lithium metal electrodes made by the lamination of lithium metal foil to thin solid electrolyte membranes that are highly conductive. Past efforts to improve lithium cycling by moving to solid-state structures based on polycrystalline ceramics have found limited success due to initiation and propagation of dendrites, which are branchlike metal fibers that short-circuit battery cells.

Ionic Materials will develop a lithium metal (not lithium ion) rechargeable battery cell that employs a novel solid polymer electrolyte that enables the world’s first truly safe lithium metal rechargeable battery cell. Scientists at the City University of New York have found that Ionic Material’s proprietary ionic conducting polymer is the most highly lithium conducting solid state polymer material ever measured (at room temperature).