Prime Movers Lab Webinar Series: Ocean Technology
From kelp curry to entire floating cities, the “Blue Tech” wave is starting to break
The United Nations has declared 2021–2030 a “decade of the ocean”. [1] What images come to mind when you think about the ocean? Have you imagined what it might be like to live out there in a few decades? In last week’s webinar, we spoke with three amazing ocean entrepreneurs about what our future interactions with the oceans will look like, and the technologies that will help us get there.
[Click the link above to play the video]
Expert Panelists
- Marc Collins Chen is the Co-founder and CEO of Oceanix, which he and Itai Madamombe founded to help coastal communities around the world become more resilient in response to rising sea levels. Oceanix designs and builds floating cities for people to live sustainably on the ocean. In addition to being a leading expert on floating cities, Marc is a mechanical engineer by training, a serial entrepreneur, and former Minister of Tourism for Tahiti (French Polynesia).
- Dr. Tom Goreau is the President of the Global Coral Reef Alliance and Chief Scientist at Blue Regeneration. Tom is a co-inventor of Biorock, a technology that uses a trickle of safe, low-voltage electricity to regrow marine structures. Blue Regeneration is using this technology to rapidly grow or restore marine ecosystems and coral reefs around the world. Tom conducts research on coral reef restoration, fisheries restoration, shore line protection, renewable energy, community based coral reef management, mariculture, soil metabolism, and stabilization of global carbon dioxide.
- Bren Smith is the co-founder and Executive Director of Green Wave, and a former commercial fisherman. GreenWave is a non-profit that trains and supports regenerative ocean farmers, in coastal communities throughout North America. Their model is a “polyculture” farming system that grows a mix of seaweeds and shellfish that require zero inputs, all while sequestering carbon and nitrogen and creating blue-collar jobs. Their goal is to create a blue green economy of at least 10,000 regenerative farmers in the next 10 years.
We are grateful to our incredible panelists for sharing their expertise and perspectives with us and the community. Check out the work they are doing at the links in their bios. Also check out Bren Smith in The Economist over the weekend!
Webinar Highlights
In 100 years, will we be living on the oceans? Humans have been living on the water for thousands of years, from the Uru on Lake Titicaca, to communities in SE Asia, to the houseboats in Sausalito, California. As the world’s population increases, Marc feels it is inevitable that we will live on the ocean.
There are many opportunities that could come from learning to live on the water. One of my favorite ideas is that this is a key early step to learning to live in space. (See Marshall T. Savage’s book, “The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps.”) But there are more practical and urgent reasons as well…
How will we manage sea level rise and real estate? “The seas are rising, and our strategies are to build some walls and leave the coast,” said Bren Smith. Miami raised a $400mm bond back in 2017 to raise roads. Cost estimates to protect current infrastructure through seawalls and drainage projects are in the billions per municipality, too expensive for many of these to be seriously considered. Even NYC, the wealthiest city by GDP, cannot afford the $120B seagate proposed in one study. If NYC can’t afford it, what does that mean for smaller, less affluent countries and particularly island nations?
Adding to the challenge of sea level rise, mayors and urban planners are actively looking for solutions for how to not just survive, but grow. Globally, three million people a week are moving into cities (that’s 2.5 billion more people living in cities by 2050), and 9 out of 10 megacities are coastal. To house these newcomers, the amount of real estate/built environment needs to DOUBLE over the next 40 years.
Marc and his team at Oceanix are working to both address this challenge and to reframe this conflict, creating a vision of living with the sea, rather than fighting it. Rather than focusing on walling off cities to protect them, many are starting to imagine alternatives like strategic, managed retreat.
The good news? “Backs against the wall, we’re pretty good as a species.”
In the near term, Tom Goreau has a solution to dumping increasing amounts of sand to replace eroding beaches. Blue Regeneration’s Biorock technology enables communities to regrow coral reefs AND the beaches they protect simultaneously. Applying a “trickle” of electricity (from renewable sources) to metal structures underwater causes CO2 dissolved in the water form a cement-like material on their surface. This allows marine life to move back in, while sequestering CO2 and combating ocean acidification.
Where are there opportunities in the bluetech space? The growth in economic activity across ocean verticals in the last decade is incredible. The oil and gas sector remains the largest ocean industry, generating about 1/3 of the ocean economy’s value. However, relatively new sectors like offshore wind, telecommunications (submarine cables) are gaining speed. Desalination capacity hit an inflection point in the early 2000s and is now growing rapidly. Marine aquaculture, or mariculture is a mature area that is seeing increasing demand and signs of innovation. (For the full report on this research, check out the open-access paper by Jean-Baptiste Jouffray and his co-authors.)
Within mariculture, the first graph on the left, GreenWave is one example of an innovative approach. They recognized that the profitability of ocean farming increases when you grow things that don’t swim away and that you don’t have to feed — in their case, a mixture of shellfish and seaweed growing together. This allows farmers to keep capital costs low and creates blue collar jobs. GreenWave’s model is to start by creating small farms that are easily replicated— the “nail salons” of the sea.
Seaweed can be turned into many products, but consider just the growing interest in plant-based protein. Using less than 5% of US waters to farm seaweed, ocean farmers could grow as much protein as 3 trillion hamburgers. This would also capture 135 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to the CO2 emissions of California’s agricultural sector) plus 10 million tonnes of nitrogen— “breathing life back into the ocean”. As Bren Smith, who happens to be a former commercial fisherman, noted: “there are no jobs on a dead ocean.”
Acceleration in one sector of ocean technology will benefit others. The offshore infrastructure for wind farms could be coupled with mariculture, and vice versa. While abandoned oil and gas platforms could be repurposed for mariculture and ecosystem restoration (or maybe even carbon capture and sequestration?), many “rigs to reefs” projects have faced major legal barriers.
Can oceans be used to store CO2? Yes, the oceans are a critical part of the carbon cycle. Something that may not be obvious is that seagrasses, salt marshes, and mangroves support marine soils that have the highest organic carbon in the world, and they hold it very well. We’ve destroyed about 1/2 of the world’s seagrasses, salt marshes, and mangroves — rebuilding these could dramatically increase CO2 sequestration. The oceans have a lot of potential, but there is also a lot of hype (e.g. around sinking seaweed into ocean trenches) and science that needs to be done to get the accounting right.
Using the ocean to produce fertilizer for land-based ag was an interesting idea proposed by Bren. On land, we use nutrients ineffectively. Tons of nitrogen fertilizer runs off farmland and into water ways each year, producing red tides, algae blooms, and a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico that can reach the size of Massachusetts. Farming seaweed (which is rich in nitrogen), processing it, and using this as fertilizer is a possible strategy to close the nutrient cycle while cutting emissions from nitrogen production.
Is blue-tech still “too early”? Perhaps, but the steep increase in our utilization of the ocean across sectors suggests we may be close. The fact that the blue-tech space still feels early to many investors is also part of its draw. The brief period between “too early” and “clearly inevitable” is where massive blue ocean value creation opportunities exist.
The biggest challenge of this webinar was that it was just one hour! There are many interesting areas like offshore energy production, deep sea mining, communications and sensing technologies and ocean autonomy that we just didn’t get to. Expect more ocean-related content to come.
- The UN actually made the decision that 2021–2030 would be the Ocean Decade back in 2017. There are also multiple special decades going on at any given time. The decade from 2011–2020 was “the Decade on Biodiversity”… judging by our progress on that front in the last ten years (467 species extinct), it takes a lot more than a UN resolution to solve these problems.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
Sign up here if you are not already subscribed to our blog.
