Seafields, the UK-headquartered company that will cultivate and harvest sargassum seaweed in the Atlantic Ocean to remove billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, says it will be collaborating with MacroCarbon, a spin-off of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany (and Carbonwave in the US) to co-develop and accelerate the intellectual property required to farm seaweed near shore.

MacroCarbon, based in Spain, plans to become a leader in developing sustainable seaweed alternatives to fossil fuels. Seafields has confirmed that MacroCarbon will set aside €600,000 from a €2mn fund from SPRIN-D Carbon to further its understanding of domesticating wild sargassum.

Seafields plans to establish fixed aquafarms in the Caribbean to provide a stable supply of sargassum. It hopes to develop the local infrastructure needed to process the Sargassum into products. It’ll sink the rest of the seaweed, for long-term carbon dioxide removal, in the Atlantic abyssal plain.

Seafields says its approach to growing sargassum in free-floating aquafarms in the South Atlantic Ocean Gyre radically tackles the challenge of climate change. By baling and storing large quantities of the seaweed at over 4000 metres below sea level, in the deep abyssal plain of the Atlantic Ocean, the company aims to trap a gigatonne every year of atmospheric carbon dioxide for thousands of years. However, in order to achieve the grand vision and intermediate step, focusing on stationary aquafarms in the Caribbean is beneficial.

“The money and partnership will go directly to increasing our understanding of how to domesticate sargassum as well as the intellectual property needed to develop our first ‘catch and grow’ farms,” says Seafields CEO, John Auckland. “To remove one gigaton of CO2, this focus on fixed and stationary aquafarms is crucial as an intermediary step. It will also help alleviate the invasive sargassum that is currently impacting communities in the Caribbean – all while starting a first-of-its-kind supply chain directly to industry.”

The company plans to reduce the amount of sargassum beaching by catching the seaweed further out at sea before it reaches land through the aquafarms, then turn it into industrial feedstock. It says this will provide job creation and employment opportunities to local communities in the Caribbean.

“After the success of the collaboration between two German research institutions AWI and GEOMAR and the two companies Seafields and Carbonwave during Phase I of the Carbon to Value challenge supported by SPRIN-D, we thought it was time to consolidate our collaboration in a new company, MacroCarbon that fosters the collaboration between seaweed aquafarmers and seaweed-product developers,” says Macrocarbon, Dr Mar Fernández Méndez. “By combining aquafarming and production in one integrated value chain, we aim to speed up decarbonisation by both avoiding emissions and long-term sequestration. Furthermore, we are excited about this collaboration with Seafields who will enable the development of stationary sargassum aquafarming in different locations both for feedstock production for the chemical industry as well as ocean carbon dioxide removal.”

Meanwhile, as reported by MIN in March 2023, a colossal 5000-mile wide mass of seaweed is heading towards the beaches of Florida, having formed in the Atlantic Ocean. The seaweed is to land on beaches in Florida around July, Dr. Brian Lapointe, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. Scientists have tracked increasingly larger accumulations since 2011 and it’s thought that this year’s sargassum mass could be the largest on record.

In 2021, Seafields was named by Coldplay as an associated organisation to support the band’s efforts to make its upcoming tour as sustainable and low-carbon as possible.

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