Can Seaweed Save the World?
Thisprogram aired on Tuesday, 22 August 2017 on the ABC Catalyst ScienceShow. It can be viewed at http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4722454.htm Transcript Downloadvideo: mp4 | Watchon iview ABC Summary: “ProfessorTim Flannery investigates how seaweed is helping to save the world - fromgrowing the foods of the future, helping clean polluted water and evencombating climate change. Growingseaweed is now a ten billion dollar a year global industry. Tim travels toKorea to see some of the biggest seaweed farms in the world and meets thescientists who are hoping to create a seaweed revolution here in Australia.” Comment Thisprogram is an essential milestone in the movement of carbon removal into the centreof the climate debate. The scale of potential seaweed production at sea, andthe range of storage and profitable commodity options, mean that industrialseaweed production is the best option for a scalable method to stabilise theplanetary climate by removing carbon from the air. Flannery cites the work ofOcean Foresters that found “if you cover 9% of the world ocean in seaweedfarms, you could offset all of current emissions.” Theprogram starts by discussing the range of technological innovations occurringin North Queensland, interviewing Professor Rocky de Nys of James CookUniversity, who is leading research on seaweed as a profitable method to removenutrient pollution that is harming the Great Barrier Reef, using the produced seaweedfor food, biochar fertilizer, reduction of cattle methane emissions and to growfish. De Nys observes that the lack of structure in seaweed enables it to growfar faster than any terrestrial plant, with major productivity benefits. Next PiaWinberg explains the high value nutraceutical, plastic, food and carbon removalpotential of seaweed. Then Dr Flannery visits South Korea, where theInternational Seaweed Expo illustrates the current large scale and lift-offpotential once the industry goes pelagic. He visits the small islandof Wando which produces a million tons of seaweed a year, and could roll out onoceanic scale once nutrient supply is developed. That problem should be simpleto solve as noted below, since wave energy can pump rich water from below thethermocline. Such farms could remove an estimated 160,000 tons of carbon persquare kilometre, either sending it to long term storage on the ocean floor orusing it for stable construction storage such as bricks. But in atelling comment, Professor Ik Kyo Chung explains that “everyone wants to dosome terrestrial environment like trees.” The barrier is political - the carboncapture industry suffers from terrestrial bias, ignoring how seaweed grown atsea has much greater technical and economic potential than trees, and does notcompete with other higher value uses of the space. A marinepermaculture solution to some of the engineering problems, using wind and waveand solar to pump ocean nutrient to the surface, is being developed by Dr BrianHerzen of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. With ocean sediments alreadynaturally storing millions of tons of seaweed carbon each year, speeding upthis process offers excellent prospects. AdamBumpus explains research status on conversion to bricks, and the potential forseaweed to address global food security. Flannerycomments that “when transformative new ideas grip the world, the changes theycreate can happen quickly.” My reviewof Flannery’s recent book Sunlight and Seaweed is here. RobertTulip RelatedInfo Feeding seaweed to cows to reduce methane levels Prof Rocky de Nys looks at applied algal biotechnologies The unique Wando Seaweeds Expo Seagrasses, saltmarshes and mangrovesas a climate change solution -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
