DEEP WATER FLEXIBLE FLOATING REEFS: SPINOFF FROM U.S. MARINER

Current seaweed cultivation in India is limited to intertidal areas, in shallow and calm seawater. This limits the production potential of seaweed as a resource for producing several valuable products. To increase harvest volumes, there is a need to develop offshore seaweed farming technology resilient in adverse weather conditions such as storms, cyclones, etc. The US Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) initiated the MacroAlgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Research (MARINER) program to develop technologies to eventually sustainably harvest millions of tons of macroalgae at $80 per dry metric ton (DMT) with offshore technology.

OceanForesters, one of the groups funded in this program, is collaborating with Indian researchers and industry partners to initiate a similar project in India, but with an initial focus on non-seaweed food production with a permanent floating flexible reef structure like that shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.

The multi-year life allows many species of flora and fauna to establish a complete ecosystem.As a result, the flexible artificial reef can have an optimally balanced suite of seafood products including snappers, sea urchin, lobster, seabass, anchovies, flying fish, other finfish, octopi, crabs, shellfish, molluscs, sea cucumbers, seaweed, etc. for local consumption and export.

• Submerging during tropical cyclones
• Synthetic rope resistant to biologic sharps, grit, creep, and UV
• Rope terminations and connections that maintain 100% of rope strength

Because sales of seafood pay for the structure, this system produces seaweed at lower costs than current cultivation methods. Eventually a full scale system could be competitive with projected prices for fossil fuels.