EESN: The Oceans and Carbon Drawdown

hi i'm whitney espic the ceo of the mit alumni association and i hope you enjoy this digital production created for alumni and friends like you folks out there ready to listen to our seaweed for carbon drawdown webinar from the energy environment and sustainability network of the mit alumni we're delighted to be here today uh the group our network itself is designed to inform connect and have alumni act together on environment energy and sustainability issues many of which come together in our pursuit of climate change solutions and challenges we have many groups around eesn uh we're we try to stay flexible with that the palm beach uh mit club has a subgroup that is issue that is involved with climate issues claude gerstel who i believe will be on today uh but not talking as a listener mentioned to us that we haven't covered oceans and drawdown previously and so here we are with his advisor on one ocean project peter dreyer and with jeff chapin who who who also is involved in seaweed drawdown so um we welcome you and we hope you'll enjoy this webinar it it we we have disc and my cat decided to come visit uh we have we have um we have disabled the chat for this webinar however we ask you to please put questions on what is being said in the question and answer section of the zoom zoom site we we do not see you you can see us we will be using the chat if we have something to tell you for example i've put the eesn website in there already um so that's most of the logistics i think we're going to have approximately 20 uh presentations by our two panelists and then at the end we will have questions and answers and ramon and i uh who are the web committee for eesn the webinar committee excuse me uh we'll do our best to try and cover the questions the slides from the presentations will be available afterwards at our website at our website it may take a day or two to get that posted the recording will probably be posted on the mit alumni association website in about a week to be shared with other people jeff chapin who received his mba in 2002 is ceo and founder of c combinator which is a for-profit public benefit corporation a b corp companies developing a process to make high-value products from seaweed initially with sargassum seaweed washing up on caribbean shores and and this is in fact on the registration page if you want to go back and check some of this later or look jeff up and linkedin or something they plan to license marine permaculture tech from climate foundation laying the groundwork to grow kelp forests to replenish fish stocks de-acidified the ocean and eventually draw down large amounts of co2 for a negative cost for benefit jeff has founded and and been ceo of other many other ventures some of which have have provided energy efficiency and solar to homes across new england um they have worked on his companies have worked on the cost of reverse osmosis using solar power etc has won various awards um among them ernst young's young and ernst young's young entrepreneur of the entrepreneur of the year in new england uh he's also has a climate champion designation he is a chapter director of new england entrepreneurs no of the of the environmental entrepreneurs often known as e2 and that's a business voice for the environment that pursues policy change at the state and federal level briefly peter who will be our second speaker today is a four-degree mit alum and then he's went out and did various enterprises educational uh activities and keeps inventing things um so today uh he's he's here to talk to us about a project he's working on which is not quite ready for prime time in terms of all of its information but certainly is a business and a venture that is that is about to get going to use parts of the ocean that that have very little life to them and try to fertilize them with iron uh it has been studied at mit in a couple of ways and many people have done research etc um he believes that toilets for example that he wants to to to spend his life working on ways to save lives and and make people healthier uh one of his former ventures was toilets for africa which is a dry toilet system that that sanitizes waste gets rid of all the diseased germs and pathogens and they are being used around the world today another invention that he made was an improvement for lithium iron lithium-ion batteries which is now being adopted by tesla the the air force uh i believe has already made use of it so with that i'm going to turn it over to jeff to talk about how seaweed can help us cool the earth and be a part of our sustainable future thank you thanks to eesn for having me on i really appreciate the opportunity it's exciting to be here to talk about what is a pretty big opportunity for climate and for sustainability in general c combinator is a public benefit corporation which really only means that we take into account our mission when we have board meetings et cetera but other but our entire business model is aligned towards the environment uh we're following the principles of drawdown the sustainable development goals one percent for the planet and uh as a public benefit corporation what we're trying to address uh several drawdown solutions and if you've ever seen the movie uh kiss the ground or the also the movie a life on a planet by david attenborough we're very much in line with what has been proposed there and uh so what we do is we at a high level we take products from so we make products from sargassum that go into bioplastics sargassum is a seaweed that has been accumulating over time in the caribbean and globally but with the advent of more and more fertilizer coming out of the amazon rainforest where that's been converted to farmland all of that fertilizer and nutrient runoff has collided with warmer oceans and an existing sargassum floating seaweed and it's really magnified it into a massive issue several studies at least one study points to uh almost 100 gigatons 100 million gigatons of carbon and and uh of sargassum floating around so what we do is we take that sargassum in the caribbean we create these bioplastics biochar and biostimulants as well as even power our own we're going to be powering our own biochar plant with that biomass and it enables regenerative annual cropping conservation agricultural perennial biomass production and nutrient management so here's really what we're doing and all of this contributes to a lot of drawdown that will also be applied to marine permaculture this is the problem in the caribbean around the caribbean massive amounts are piling up on beaches hurting tourism eliminating jobs creating an ecological disaster in the bays and leaking a bit of arsenic into the environment now it's important to note that sargassum when in the open sea is terribly important to the ecology and it's part of the biological pump of the ocean but once it gets here it just sits on the beaches and starts to rot into methane and hydrogen sulfide it stinks and has terrible side effects and so up until now due to the variable nature the seasonal nature of this which is really about nine or ten months out of the year uh it just hasn't there hasn't been solutions that have been uh scaled up to really deal with this problem that is here to stay for uh it's only getting worse and we're not going to cool the oceans any time soon and the amazon runoff is not likely to stop so we have to find a way to deal with it what we have is we have a facility in mexico and puerto morales that collects and processes at scale this sargassum so we're we're if you will blessed by the mexican government to do this we're in fact writing their collection uh criteria for how to collect sargassum we are um supported by the government the mexican navy is even bringing us their sargassum and we have our own facility to collect and process and what we do is we we are able to collect up to a million tons a year with our capacity now next year we'll only produce we'll only process about 50 000 tons but we could do up to a million tons and so we have massive scalability there's plenty of supply that's that's not the issue the question then becomes what do you do with the sargassum in our case we found ways to do the basics which others have found in green here there's the biostimulant you see which has use cases in farming it is a way to increase crop yields and actually protect a bit from drought we produce people have also produced nanocellulose in some capacity which has a range of possibilities in packaging composite plastics etc and fucoidan it can be used in pharmaceuticals up top on the hydrogels and alginate in green there that's where we have our proprietary processes that really add a lot of value to what we're doing so hydrogels are absorbents that can absorb water when it rains say on a field and then hold it and then release it back slowly over time so you can imagine the the tremendous benefit when combined with of these agricultural hydrogels that can really manage flash rainfalls and help drought situations and so we're working with companies in india that are bringing this to fields there and then we're also uh producing that's a proprietary process uh allows us to create hydrogels in a very efficient way from sargassum which is key sargassum is not an easy seaweed to deal with it's got arsenic it's got obviously salt but it's got you've got to deal with several factors so we have filed ip on the hydrogel extraction technique and then from there we can also make aerogels from the hydrogels and so aerogels are highly insulative lightweight materials so you can imagine them being used in patagonia jackets in fact we have a big retailer in europe who wants to put them in their clothing next year for the sustainability story but also frankly just it does really outperform highly insulative material can be used in textiles and it can be used in batteries and high-tech applications and appliances where you want to seal heat from one side to the next and protect the system so our process is a biorefinery we start with a sargassum and create as i've said the biostimulant biopolymer which goes into bioplastics so it's a huge application to actually create biodegradable plastic that does not require high temperatures etc to degrade it will degrade in the ocean we're talking with some major players in europe about packaging for both takeout and fast food applications plastic bags coffee mugs etc that can be used for bioplastics so we hope to take what the ocean has given us and create something very useful out of it the alginate and cellulose i mentioned the hydrogel so you have those use cases but the key point here is hydrogels and aerogels that's our proprietary process so we're the first to be able to get such value out of seaweeds at any scale and what that does is allow us to do a lot more things in terms of collection and actually what i'll talk about in the future which is marine permaculture growing the seaweed itself but it's key that we have the proprietary processes there and can get some a product that's worth two hundred dollars a kilogram because that makes all the difference when you think about um the economics behind all of this and the process does use one tenth of water half the energy and none of the chemicals of traditional alginate extraction technology so it is better for the environment in that way as well so these are the applications that our stack bar of value as we grow this out over the next 18 months we're starting with biostimulants we're hoping we think we have a pretty good beat on a big federal government in mexico contract for biostimulants they really want to take a national liability and turn it into an asset so their farmer buying cooperative is looking at us from that perspective because we have the volume the same volume is really important for our other customers so we have lois from customers in the fibers market the hydrogels and aerogels market that really have come to us because of the volume so many as regulations in europe eliminate micro plastics and single-use plastics many of the companies they are really struggling to figure out where they're going to get their supply next whether it's from forestry or in our case we want them to take it from seaweed and yet they have not found enough supply and in terms of large suppliers one of the reasons for this is that seaweed generally is grown near shore and uh and is used for for human consumption in asia obviously but there are only so many places where seaweed grows naturally sargassum is the exception to that in that we have an inundation and so it makes absolute sense to take care of this inundation to use it and put it to productive use that also helps the environment it helps the environment in two ways one it avoids future emissions of course from products that would have been created using other processes and have a much higher carbon footprint so for example the biostimulants piece one kilogram of our biostimulant is somewhere between seven and thirty times more less harmful in terms of carbon footprint than a biostimulant made from petrochemicals most of the products we're producing originally come from petrochemicals polymers etc so we have an effective avoidance piece on carbon but then also we're look so we're going to be creating hydrochar and biochar out of the waste sargassum so it's important to realize that the fresh we can create products with but there's a lot of rotted sargassum too that you're just not going to be able to use and so we're we're going to be turning that into biochar to be put on fields etc alongside biostimulants and these agricultural hydrogels which expand with water and contract we can actually enrich the soils turn dirt into soil and and increase farmer yields using all that we have lois from customers across many of these product lines each of these represents a specific loi of a type of customer those hydrogels i mentioned are used in cosmetics as well as can be applied to the field in the bottom left there where they help seeds survive drought and manage rain flash floods as i mentioned the packaging plastic cups and bags and then hydroponic as well as fields stimulants all of these are getting a lot of attention we do not have contracts yet but that's because we only got the samples from the sargassum in about on october november they're all being analyzed now by these loi customers we do have ip for all this as i mentioned in terms of the extraction methods and we're developing new products one example of a new product is a spray-on nanocellulose film that you could spray on corrugated cardboard and make it water and fat impermeable so you could carry fish in it so in the fish industry one big problem is styrofoam and but when you have lipids and water it's a it's one of the few materials that works but we're working on ways to create regular corrugated cardboard sprayed with this so we're filing ip on products like that as we work in joint development with with other companies now that's one source of what we're doing from the biorefinery perspective we take the sargassum right that's low-hanging fruit it's right there why wouldn't we pick it up and do something meaningful with it and we're pulling that from all over the caribbean not just mexico but puerto rico and we're franchising it out to trinidad and some other places where they can collect they compress the biostimulant right there just like we do in mexico get the water out and ship the dried pulp to puerto rico to be processed and that's where our processing plant is that's one source we're also in the future excited about the opportunity to work with marine permaculture and which is also another drawdown solution developed by brian von hartson at the climate foundation and we would like to make it worthwhile to scale those systems to create those systems in the ocean that farm seaweed and apply our same or similar extraction methods and similar customers to that supply so i'll tell you a little bit about what marine permaculture is and then i can i can explain it better marine permaculture has been around for a little while and we're looking forward to scaling it by licensing it in the future so what it does is it basically i described how seaweed is really a near term near-term near-shore piece a production method and that is because seaweed needs three things it needs upwelled nutrient-rich water where it naturally happens like off the coast to california it hits the shelf and comes up it needs the nutrients from the deep it needs a place to attach and it needs sunlight most seaweeds so that's what this is so this marine permaculture frees us up from the limited space where naturally occurring currents bring nutrients to the surface near rocks where it can exist near the surface and the sunlight and allows it frees up the rest of the ocean to be doing this uh we use it uses renewable energy to pump up large amounts of water and essentially hydroponically farms kelp which is an even more valuable seaweed at scale and so that's what we're working towards in in the partnership we will be licensing from the client foundation as they develop their product marine permaculture was produced was featured in the movie 2040 which is an australian film now available on prime and or netflix they featured five solutions that exist today that could make a difference by 2040. paul hawkin were privileged to have him upset about marine permaculture uh that you can feed billions of people uh regenerate life in the ocean because this creates little literally rain forests of the sea uh so small fish stock can live in there and thrive it creates a little bit of a of a coral reef environment in terms of the biodiversity it pulls carbon out of the upper ocean and then it is also a way to feed and bo and then sequester so you can measure the amount of carbon that's sequestered by the kelp and we're looking at ways to either sink it uh if it makes sense and there's a lot of ecological thought going into that area of work but when you look at carlos duarte's work and others if you were to sink some of that kelp right there uh it drops to the bottom of the ocean if it goes deep enough it stays sequestered away for hundreds or thousands of years and that wouldn't really be economically feasible to do if we didn't have the bio sorry if we didn't have the biorefinery creating all this product right so we can apply and create product from the marine permaculture harvest use half of it to create product and earn money and make a scalable financial solution for relatively even though it's a relatively expensive capex cost to do these arrays but now it makes sense because we can get up to six thousand dollars a ton instead of eleven hundred dollars a ton out of a a ton of seaweed so we're excited to be partnering with them in the future to do this they have had incredible credibility wins being featured in drawdown the movie 2040 et cetera there's a recent washington post editorial done by the foundation for climate restoration touting the benefits of marine permaculture and so we're really excited to work with them in the future it's also a way for island nations to both combat climate change create jobs increase export gdp numbers and it's a lever in the fight against poverty and sustainability islands as you as you know have a tremendous amount of energy and difficulty sourcing product so to have something as diverse as seaweed in terms of energy possible usage farming usage and products like everything from plastic to high-tech products if you can really create that bio-refinery and have them have these arrays off their shores in deeper water it really empowers and and enables islands to take even a more leading role in both climate change and sustainability and it really creates a range of benefits um for for these these island nations so we've had there's plenty of interest from the pacific and the atlantic and caribbean in doing something like this at scale the last thing i'll leave you with is that this is the key point is we've had conversations with some potential future buyers of carbon credits like the microsoft shopifys amazons of the world uh what this when you combine our biorefinery and being able to create up to six thousand dollars of value from seaweed with marine permaculture you can actually at scale sequester enough carbon to really make a difference and the the thing that's different about this type of sequestration is we're talking about a negative cost to sink a ton of carbon so if we grow a square kilometer say of seaweed we harvest half of it with this biorefinery and high value products and sell those into the marketplaces we can then create a nine percent return for the company that finances those arrays and at the same time sink the other half into the depths and when you do that you sequester away for thousands of years we're working with uh 2050 and alexander cousteau that other groups are trying to verify these credits but what it turns into is you earn money and you sequester tons of carbon and that is turning the whole carbon sequestration game on its head so a negative cost to sink a ton of carbon while we're producing uh products that avoid future emissions plastics uh biostimulants etc with with massive circular economy benefits to it so that's a conversation and i just want to be clear that there's plenty of work going on to understand any ecological harm from from dumping some uh not dumping but really from sequestering away some of that kelp to the bottom of the ocean we have to worry about the ecological systems down below international law et cetera but carlos davarte and others have pointed out that this this really could be a massive carbon sink and uh it's one of the reasons why it's on the drawdown uh list of up-and-coming solutions so we're excited about that um and we're working towards that right now we're focused almost entirely on sargassum and and and working through that we have traditional hockey sticks etc we can we can show you more if you want we are doing an investment round if people do have interest we're doing we've raised about two and a half million so far we have an loi for eight million to build out our facility in puerto rico and uh and we're closing the five million dollar round early next year um to build out other product line productions aerogels and hydrogels etc so we have i'll finish up by just saying we have a a team focused on this on innovation cfo we have obviously a business dev and then a team of scientists and other folks in puerto rico and in mexico currently running this operation which will start collecting uh large amounts starting in february so uh we're also partnering with with uh the pacific clean energy partners for financing of these arrays and future work so we're excited about that and thanks to rob pratt who i'm imagining many of you know he's been a real help to to us in various ways so that's it thank you thank you for your time appreciate it uh very interesting many dimensions to represent it we're going to hold off on questions till the end of the second speaker so without any uh further delay peter you're on ocean fertilization well to feed the world healthier and cheaper food and to sequester gigatons of carbon uh what me worry that's a phrase from alfred newman at a back in the day and last century they had these things called comic books and that was his phrase now it turns out that humans a couple million years ago two guys were sitting around a campfire in africa and they read some rustling in the in the weeds and the grasses and one guy said that's probably just the wind and the other guy said no i think that's some lions i'm getting out of here and he runs away well anyway the guy who sat there was eaten by a lion and he never had any children so as a result as humans were all bred to be worrywarts so if you're worried about climate change join the you know that you're you're normal uh now i want to tell you about so another thing i'm becoming an expert in is biochemistry particularly biochemistry of aging and diseases of aging because far and away diseases of aging kill 80 to 90 percent of humans and obviously cancer demand show heart disease now it turns out there is a chemical called new 5 gc used to be in humans a couple million years ago and then we switched it out for new and this is a neuraminic acid five ac which made us immune to the uh malaria of the day now malaria has evolved to now kill us again but humans are new five ac but pork beef and lamb and goats are still the gc and the gc is implicated in aging in a big way in particular it's in every cancer cell and it wears down your epithelium causes heart disease and inflammation that leads to dementia so we want to get rid of that from the diet so we want to get rid of pork and beef worldwide that's my goal and the solution is deep ocean fish because the fish do not have new 5 gc and we can raise the catch enough to displace 180 megatons of pork and beef produced worldwide now that is a practical solution because there's a hundred and fifty believe it or not mega tons of fish produced each year now those of us who don't live near the shore we think what we don't get fish that much but if you've ever been to hawaii all it is is fish and rice fish and rice fish and rice and japan england same thing now the neat thing is the cost of feeding ocean fish is a lot cheaper than corn and soybeans you feed chickens and and turkeys and other animals in fact one kiloton of iron dust which is a couple hundred bucks can create one megaton of fish which is worth billions of dollars so small so we're starting with small fishing fertilization areas of only 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers uh the only problem with our fishing project is that it causes global cooling it sinks about a gigaton of carbon dioxide per year and it's believed that fossil fuels add 20 gigatons of carbon dioxide here and so we want to do 50 projects in the north pacific which would sink 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year and so according to peter fiorkowski and others if we do that for by for the next uh 30 years by 2050 will be back below 300 parts per million and the planet will start cooling again like it was before 1800 so if we get too cold we're gonna blame it on electric cars and not our fish defecating so what's the science of ocean iron fertilization most oceans have enough sufficient primary fertilizers nitrates phosphates and potassium things you would use to fertilize your your lawn or your your terrestrial crops but some oceans lack trace fertilizers particularly iron and as a result in those parts and those oceans uh the climate is a desert there's no animal life no plant life no seaweed nothing it's just you know salt water so if you just sprinkle in a little bit of iron and i'm talking trace amounts some guys have done it some of the early experimenters have done it off the back of luxury yachts in hawaii uh there's a singer i'm trying to remember that user george harrison or uh or some some singer did it off the back of his yacht and caused a plankton bloom off hawaii uh now a lot of the plankton there are single cell animals they do photosynthesis they absorb a lot of carbon dioxide and a lot of them make calcium carbonate shells uh that the calcium carbonate that goes into the chalk cliffs of dover the white cliffs of dover are these little uh calcium carbonate animals and uh after they're eaten the fish don't uh dissolve the calcium carbonate and it comes out in the feces and it sinks down to the deep ocean now larger multi-cell animals eat the plankton and of course about on average three to four times the body weight of those fish and larger animals is defecated each year and ends up going down deep some 7 000 feet where the pressure and temperature and darkness preserve them and as a result the earth gets cold what you can see here is some iron dust being dropped off the back of a boat and uh here's a uh now these algae blooms these plankton blooms uh show up on satellite you know when you're out in the ocean you don't see this white but at a certain frequency of light spectrophotometer through the satellites they show up very brightly so you can tell exactly where you fertilized or not now what how does that global cooling happen naturally well iron dust makes plankton nitro now in addition some of the plankton that iron dust stimulates they actually fix nitrogen from the air the cyanobacterial bloom and as a result if you look at the picture here when those photosynthetic algae get going they suck excess amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air but also they create excess oxygen in the water and that excess oxygen causes the ph to go up that increases the formation of calcium carbonate it increases the amount of fish in the water it makes it clean and healthy for fish now if you are not have enough iron you end up with a dirty high acidic carbonic acid ocean like you see in the right half of that picture and as a result you get this slimy water and a bunch of anaerobic jellyfish so if you have a jellyfish coming on the beach here in florida sometimes it happens or in connecticut there's always jellyfish on the beach it means that your water doesn't have enough iron dust in it and enough oxygen now curiously what eats um uh those jellyfish are turtles and turtles don't breathe water they breathe air and so there is a natural cycle and so unfortunately although our fish go up with iron fertilization the turtles and the jellyfish go down now what's also happening when we uh fertilize with iron is there are these pelagic fish that start having a healthy meal at the surface and the pelagic fish during the day they go down to stay cool they go down 3000 feet and at night they come up and they feed on the sardines and when they come up they bring up cold water with them and nutrients with them and they make the ocean even more intensely alive so global warming causes hotter drier deserts so how does this happen so what's happening now uh and bigger winds and storms there are more iron dust storms in fact in 2020 this past summer everybody was worried you see the photographs to the right there that we were having the biggest dust storm in 50 years well that dust is what makes the water become more alkaline and more oxygenated and it sequesters carbon and causes global cooling so that the world system is in a self-regulating balance and obviously we're trying to take over the controls from mother earth now there's this guy in the upper right hand corner peter fikowski who i just got introduced to yesterday and he did a a wonderful bunch of analysis and he has an organization that maybe we'll meet later and they've studied this global warming or climate change problem in great detail they have conferences every year and he's been doing this for a number of years and he sent me this presentation and i want to point out that they analyze the many things that can draw down carbon dioxide and what was interesting is he said refrigeration was one of them obvious and i didn't know why that was but reduced food waste that makes sense wind turbines plant-rich diet makes sense educating girls and family planning reducing obviously solar farms now the other thing you can see is we've got the natural self-regulating planet operating with cooling and heating and carbon dioxide going up and down over these 10 000 year periods approximately and creating ice ages and then warm warm spells now we've kind of overdone it by unsequestering all the carbon from oil and natural gas now peter's group started analyzing what are the possible solutions he's an engineer he's had a company very successful company and he said well look if we're going to try to do what the politicians are trying to do and shut down the coal-fired power plants and all the gasoline-powered cars it's gonna cost a hundred dollars per ton of co2 removed and it's gonna cost 300 billion dollars a year and it's just as at the most expensive solution and of course people are going to fight against it now he says that in the air uh one of the major causes and one of his chart shows up 45 40 45 of global warming is methane being released from gas wells and landfills and cow flatus animal fleas and it goes up to the high atmosphere gets converted to carbon dioxide by the ozone which is oxygen 3 very reactive and that carbon dioxide hangs way up high you know 60 100 000 feet up and it takes decades for it to come down and provides us great carbon blanket so a lot of the carbon dioxide that's coming out of a coal-fired power plant near the surface because it's heavier than air you know it's hot but carbon dioxide so the thing is methane is lighter than uh oxygen and nitrogen so it floats up to the high atmosphere carbon dioxide is heavier so it comes back down and feeds the plants and the oceans nearby so coal fire power plants are actually our friends and it's these methane guys that are our enemies so the idea is is that removing methane from the air if you spray iron dust up high like it happens naturally that actually takes methane out of the air but but peter uh fierkowski so i'll go back to my project in a minute i just wanna it's interesting that he came to the same conclusion we did uh from the palm beach group so they absolutely i think i think is to take as a penny a ton is to increase the fish in the oceans and so uh however what i want to point out uh you know i did work in the fossil fuel industry so i feel sorry for those guys is that the question is will we still pump oil in 2050 actually their oil is there but we'll pump less because the reserves will be down and then the question is will we still use oil in 2050 and the answer is no i was involved with the lithium-ion batteries industry with tesla and others is that because 40 of oil consumption is trucks and you save a million dollars a year i mean a million dollars over the life of a truck just by going electric because electric is so much cheaper than gasoline and so all the trucks are going to convert to electric by 2030 and then 40 percent of oil consumption currently is electric cars and they're all going to convert by 2050 and then the uh 10 percent of oil consumption is aircraft and already my my neighbors in ohio are for general electric are making hybrid electric jet engines for commercial aircraft and they're already you can take an electric plane from uh falmouth to nantucket already actually we had a question from jason silbeck about um i'm not reading it directly here uh he was wondering whether the fertilization and perhaps even marine permaculture that jeff mentioned could be like the kudzu program problem in the south when you introduce a spirit a species at industrial scale or if you encourage a species to grow an industrial scale um isn't isn't that going to present a certain amount of problems and could it could it um could it kind of take over that part of the ocean and change the ecologies there i'll address at least from a seaweed perspective thank you for that question i am trying to answer some of these questions in the chat as we go uh absolutely uh something you need to worry about and you need to use native species that exist already in those areas and additionally you need to have multiple species types so that it's not mono cropping and it's more resistant and healthy for the environment there is one type of yeah there is one type of plankton we're trying to avoid so you know we have the option of inoculating uh probiotics basically and that actually feed uh that are just like in the toilets we use probiotics to feed on the typhoid we use probiotics in the ocean to feed on the bad bad plankton well we'll be interested in finding out more about them ramon was there a question that you've picked out that you'd like to answer well there was a question from earlier on i believe it's for jeff from solomon ghosting rose said um you said 100 gigatons of a problem uh a question just moved where is it oh sorry it's unanswered now i was just answering it yes that's a good question uh that ramon that that he raises um either me or you finish reading the question so that the audience can you know yeah i'll answer so the yeah the question uh was good it was about um so i don't have it exactly is how do you there's a massive amount of sargassum can mark global markets support that uh to the extent that you can then uh sell you know and deal with all of the sargassum and exist in the markets um it is a good question there the markets for for seaweed are massive now uh seaweed for europe just published a report about how big they are at least nine billion uh but it's growing so that what's important to note is that the use cases for seaweed and the elements extracted from it are growing all the time so there's so there's the existing market there's the new use cases that are being discovered continually and then there's this piece where as we increase supply the price will come down and as the price declines that opens up new use cases so for example hydrogels and aerogels at 200 a kilogram are not viable for use in many in as many use cases as they would be if they were a hundred dollars per kilogram or ten dollars per kilogram so we will be expanding the market again that way but certainly it'd be we we'd love to figure out where the limits are because uh that would be a multi-billion multi-trillion dollar issue at some point if we can use seaweed the way we want to with marine permaculture and sargassum but we're going to try but it between food fertilizer agricultural and then end use case products from plastics to health products to composites and and even lcd panels i mean it's just an incredible array when you google what nanocellulose can be used for and alginates and other things so we're going to work on it that's great i see one here from jonathan huber who asked a couple of questions and and i believe jeff has answered a couple of them in the q a but one question here is what is the half-life of life of fish feces with respect to carbon sequestration he's asking about the accounting for the carbon storage in the carbon sink um is the feces carbon all organic how much carbon ends up in the carbohydrates of plankton which peter was speaking of how much does ocean acidification affect all of this redissolving the carbonates to re acidify it how does this carbon balance work in the ocean when we're talking about the processes for algae that your your um you've been discussing and hope to use in the ways in your businesses jeff if you'd go first i'd appreciate well i think the feces piece was directed towards peter uh all right sorry species but on our part okay good peter uh so about 20 of the feces are uh or inorganic minerals and about eighty percent are uh organic now obviously things get eaten on the way down uh but uh the issue is it does not get dissolved because the iron raises the oxygen and the ph of the water so so it's only the carbonic acid of the co2 dissolved in the water that makes it acid but because we are radically getting rid of the carbonic acid and the co2 we are going to an alkaline now the ocean is naturally 8.6 with oxygen it's 8.6 ph okay so that's a plating solution okay and now they're worried about the carbonic acid it's going down to 8.4 so it's not much ph difference but it's still alkaline so it is still a net plating environment but the point is is that because the of the iron it becomes an even more alkaline surface water and so none of those carbonates dissolve they all go down to davey's locker okay and um a question jeff there was go ahead we have a question from tim connors it says uh do you think there's an option to adapt the tech technology to algae in the freshwater lakes i seem to remember that a fair amount of money is spent cleaning up lakes i don't know another member of our club has a project to do that very similar to jeff uh sarah i can't i can't remember her name off hand but she's somebody in palm beach yes there are other alums that we can try and um connect you with and we'll look for them when we answer these questions uh um uh afterwards um jeff how about your processes um can you can you use freshwater algae um so there are certain species yes of seaweed that can be grown in the lakes and it's not my area of expertise i think certainly when you grow algae it our seaweed macro algae it does uptake and use nitrogen and other elements that can be in over abundance in lakes and so therefore it can be a very effective solution i think you also have to of course watch out for invasive species issues etc and uh and run away but um i would think there would be uses for that it's just not something we've looked at right now there's a there's a quick question from gk for jeff says how how are india partners helping and in what manner um and then and i'd like to have also a quick question for both of you uh before the time ends up off which is are there what um country laws legislation and or international law and legislation comes into play when you're dealing with expanding large scale interventions in the ocean and how what what do you know about that so far but first you know gk's question about india yeah sure um so thanks uk we're working with a company in india that is an agriculture company that is trying to help farmers deal with heat stress and also when there are uh the the monsoon rains and and how to modulate the water flows when it's heat when there's tons of rain and then it might be weeks without rain and if it's for that reason that they're interested in the agricultural hydrogel so imagine spreading across your field for a very low cost a bunch of these beads that absorb the water when it rains and then plays it back into the plant over the next 30 days you can actually tune the aggregate aerogel the hydrogel rather to time how fast it comes back out so if you infuse that with biostimulant and combine it with biochar perhaps all these really help regulate the health of the soil and help the plants survive so it's one of those players and i can share under nda the name of that of that large player we'd love to find other ways to help and get into india the question you asked ramon about about the regulations this is a key thing so in when you have farm seaweed farms near shore there are up to 17 or 20 different agencies sometimes you have to get permits from and so it can be very cumbersome part of the benefit of marine permaculture as designed by the climate foundation is that you free yourself up from those regulations when you move beyond the eez in some countries inside the eez extended economic zone might be uh workable in some countries but certainly beyond the eez entirely about 250 200 miles offshore there you're dealing with the u.n convention on the laws of the sea so uh unclose uh prohibits dumping uh and and it prohibits um it prohibits anything that isn't done in the production of a product right so if you're if it's waste from producing a product that's different than just dumping with no purpose or product behind it and that's something peter knows about too so i'll turn it over to you peter that's our major stumbling bark right now if we can if we can overcome that uh we the one we there's one commercial project that was done and they did get all the permits uh but then uh the uh the government uh changed their mind after it was done and you know public opinion uh it it's a delicate uh matter uh to be managed but uh i think it's a matter of people uh getting comfortable with the technology and the intent and what's happening um but you're right we're making fish we're not uh in the carbon sequestration business we're not trying to sell carbon credits we're not it's not new york city dumping the garbage in the atlantic ocean great i was just i was wondering if they had been any mention of whether interventions like this uh whether there was concern that aside from uh creating more fish or whatever whether there were other less less well-known unintended uh consequences but the the the large you know the one large experiment now again were 10 times the scale of that experiment had huge fish populations now i will i will also say that it has to be done in deep water if you do it in shallow water you do end up with a lot of fish poop and 100 feet of water and it will uh biodegrade biodecay bacterially and actually raise carbon dioxide and you'll end up with one of those jellyfish turtle soups with all the sargassum growing in it and so this only works in in multi thousand foot deep water and and at those pressures you know thousands of psi and very cold uh there is no um biological activity down there it is a nerd in and it's the same way our planet has made ice ages and hot ages on and off just by storing in the very deep ocean uh sequestered uh carbon so it's we're using completely natural processes it's just we're taking the controls uh away from mother nature and uh and and that's the nice thing if we stop fertilization in three years the fish go away so i mean and it declines every year and then within four years we're back to what we had beforehand so it's very much we're very much in control and so and we're monitoring the species that are there too so if we get a rogue species we know how to get rid of it so it's it's it's a it's a managed ocean it's not a wild ocean anymore i'd like to um uh kind of finish with the question of food i think when people think of seaweed and algae often we think about um food and certainly this is what the iron fertilization is is trying to make fish to feed the world um rowena lowe actually asked no bacon uh because peter wanted to go to an all fish a pescatorian diet which we could also do plant-based diets but i i was curious jeff uh and peter we know you're going to be growing fish for food um jeff are any of your products and processes direct food or is it mostly for use in in land-based farming for the sargassum it's it's there isn't as much the arsenic issue which we have dealt with by the way somebody asked about arsenic we've dealt with the arsenic issue for for biostimulants and things you put on the fields but you still is there's not as much of a food market except in food coordinates which are part of our biorefinery process so we could get fecoidans out which are healthy for people but noah for feeding the world that's more the kelp and the marine permaculture and the new kelp is extremely healthy for so many different products and so it's much more applicable there it's a big part of ice cream uh your your seaweed's used in ice cream a lot so people like ice cream surprise it's it's you know we in africa we use beans uh guar beans and that you know a lot of ice cream is guar bean you know surprise yeah we want it that's why when my freezer doesn't work the ice cream doesn't melt but but very good um so i think we've covered the open questions that's great i wanted to thank the two of you for helping us understand better number one how the oceans and and the life in the oceans can help sequester and pull carbon directly out of the air that's that's really something that uh has has gained a lot of attention in in recently um i did want to mention that we uh i want to go back to just say goodbye from the uh environment and sustainability network uh we are working hard to connect alums we welcome many and all folks to join us whether it's sending us ideas or joining our various groups we are trying to set up a good system of uh pipeline of information between the clubs and and the network as a whole any club out there who is doing climate or environmental or energy work and events we want to promote that we also want to promote uh groups like the mit alumni for climate action which is open for business and and trying to take action to they call it mobilize mobilize alums and the alum voice to become part of the way that our decision makers and policy makers find enough science to get answers to climate and environmental issues uh raymond did you have another comment or um no i'll just i'll just add that uh i'm glad we had this uh conversation about ocean-based solutions considering it's two-thirds of the planet we often don't think uh along those lines and uh i i have to think that as long as it's sustainably done and we don't do to the oceans what we've done to a lot of the landmass uh it's potentially a great contribution just like um there are many energy sources that are not really tapped and they need uh research and study but i think this i think was a great addition to the conversation so i really appreciate you guys being here yeah what we're doing is equivalent to putting farming the entire sahara we're taking a desert and we're irrigating it and planting it and having it turn into a lush rainforest right right and we do we do harvest from the ocean it's kind of like hunting in the forest but we now have boats and big nets that can accomplish the same fish scooping so thank you all very much it's been a great uh hour uh we hope you'll be back to see us again and we hope you'll be in contact with us through the website or writing to us at alumni energy mit.edu

so thank you very very much bye now have a good day everyone thank you so much for the opportunity thanks for joining us and for more information on how to connect with the mit alumni association please visit our website

2021-01-25 20:58

Other news