Disrupting the Seaweed Economy
Disrupting the Seaweed Economy:
A New Perspective on Seaweed Do’s and Dont’s
Seaweed can meet the protein needs of 10 billion people
The world population is projected to reach 9 to 10 billion by 2050. Meeting the additional demand for protein, within the limits of our environment, will be one of the biggest challenges for the global food system in the 21st century.
Current methods of protein production rely on scarce resources like arable land and fresh water and are sensitive to the impact of climate change. Apart from food, these 9 billion people will also need a sustainable source of energy, as fossil energy sources are highly polluting and depleting fast.
With 70% of the earth’s surface covered in salt water, we need to be creative in using maritime space to sustainably feed and fuel our growing population.
Let’s ensure we do better for the environment in seagriculture compared to traditional agriculture
Seaweed does not need arable land
nor fresh water
Arable land is becoming scarce. Feeding 10 billion people and livestock from land based crops is no longer feasible, and using this land at the same time for bioplastics or other bio-based materials is impossible.
Therefore, we must turn to maritime space for biomass production, but in an ecologically sound and environmentally friendly way.
We need to learn from the mistakes made on land over the past century.
Overfishing and large-scale fish farming are already leading to ecological problems.
Let’s use arable land for healthy fresh foods and scarce fresh water for critical needs like drinking water.
Seaweed farms offer shelter for marine fauna, increasing both their numbers and their diversity
Seaweed can mitigate these challenges. At GOA Ventures, we strongly believe seaweed will have an important role in the economy and environment for the next decades to come.
With a growth rate of 6% per day under ideal conditions, seaweed captures CO2 and minerals. In well-designed seaweed processing, these valuable minerals can be recuperated.
Combining fish and/or shrimp farming with seaweed farming shows ecological benefits, improving the health of the fish and shrimp and keeping local waters cleaner.
Seaweed thrives on the mineral-rich leftover fish/shrimp feed and their manure. Seaweed also acts as a shelter and nursery for small fish and crustaceans.
Integrated farming of seaweed and other marine organisms (IMTA technologies) is therefore strongly recommended.
Let’s embrace seaweeds as the biomass of the future.
Let’s share knowledge and experience to maximize the unique value of seaweed,
while taking inspiration from established industries
There are over 10,000 species of seaweed (macroalgae), each thriving in its own habitat. These species are divided into three groups: red, green, and brown seaweeds.
Some seaweeds prefer cold waters, others warmer; some need more light, others less. Common to all is, their habitat in salt water, as well as their need for CO2 and sufficient minerals (nitrogen and phosphorus) to grow.
While seaweeds are (very) distantly related to land plants, they have a unique structure and composition.
For instance, land plants contain a large amount of cellulose (sturdy wood fibres) in order to stand up straight. Contrastingly, seaweeds rely on flexible hemicellulose fibres rather than cellulose in order to bend and wave with the ocean currents.
The unique characteristics of seaweed should be taken into account in the development of novel processing strategies. We can adapt land-based biomass processing technologies and make them work for seaweeds.
Seaweeds as (novel) biomass, does not conform to current knowledge about land-based biomass.
Seaweed Growth
Seaweed is efficiently consumes CO2 to grow,
combating the acidification of ocean and the loss of coral
Seaweed’s consumption of CO2 and minerals is beneficial, as human activity has led to increasing levels of both substances in the oceans.
Rising CO2 levels are causing ocean acidification and the destruction (whitening) of coral reefs and other coastal vegetation.
Climate change and rising temperatures reduce annual ice formations, allowing seaweeds that prefer lower temperatures to flourish even further from the equator.
Fertilizer runoff from rivers like the Niger, Amazon, Mississippi, and Rhine provides the minerals seaweeds need to grow. This combination of circumstances stimulates (explosive) growth of seaweeds and algae, which is often seen as a nuisance.
However, we argue that this seaweed growth is an opportunity, both for ocean bioremediation and as a valuable industrial biomass.
Let’s welcome increasing seaweed growth and its help to mankind in combating man-made environmental mistakes and problems.
Traditional Market
Let’s learn from traditional seaweed industries
and sustainably develop them further by getting more value streams out of each kilo (lbs) of seaweed.
Using seaweed as a food is an ancient tradition that has never disappeared in some regions of the world.
In countries like Japan and Korea, seaweed has always been a diet staple. In the Western world, only a few coastal regions have maintained their connection to seaweed, using it as food but also for insulation, bedding, and other purposes.
In the last century, Ireland and Scotland developed technologies to extract ‘viscosifiers’ from seaweed —water-binders and gelling agents like alginates, carrageenan, and agar-agar. These functional ingredients are now used in various markets, including toothpaste, confectionery and dairy products.
Traditionally, the seaweed processing industry was dominated by a few large companies that bought large quantities of dried seaweed to produce single products. However, this industry has matured and become saturated. As patents expired, many small suppliers entered the market and started competing with the established players.
Today, the largest seaweed processing companies are based in China, working with dried seaweed from a.o. the Philippines and Indonesia.
In the Western market, seaweed in food is primarily found as viscosifiers. Dried seaweed is also used sporadically, and mainly to enhance the outward sustainability of a product by using the claim “seaweed inside”.
With seaweed growing faster and becoming more widely available, there are many opportunities for novel applications and new business models.
These opportunities are especially valuable for local coastal communities, due to the decline of traditional marine industries like fishing they start to embrace a new seaweed industry.
Seaweed is already an established source of food- and cosmetics ingredients, and there is a big potential for new business models into many application directions and industries.
Excessive Seaweed Growth
Seaweed can be turned from a nuisance into a valuable and useful raw material
In some regions, seaweed growth has become excessive. For example, sargassum blooms in the Caribbean have increased from approximately 2 million tons per year on beaches a decade ago to a projected 75 million tons in 2024, with estimates reaching 200 to 600 million tons per year by 2035.
This excessive growth creates new environmental problems, as beached sargassum suffocates mangrove forests and decomposes into toxic gases on beaches.
Moreover, rotting seaweed ruins the white Caribbean beaches and could collapse the local tourism industry, which is an essential source of income for the region.
Luckily, new (industrial) applications for sargassum are already emerging, turning these nuisance seaweeds into an opportunity for mankind while eliminating or at least reducing the negative environmental impact.
Also the expanding seaweed growth is creating obstacles in harbour and docking areas and the retreating of annual ice formations going higher up north (or south) brings much more territory for seaweeds to grow.
Let’s embrace rapidly expanding seaweed growth to support the needs of mankind
Seaweed offers endless opportunities, and we need your help to explore further
Currently, ‘nuisance’ seaweed is harvested and often discarded, often using polluting methods like burning or landfill sites. Many startups, institutes and companies are exploring seaweed as a novel biomass source and are trying to find a useful application for the excessive growth.
These explorations range from application in food and animal feed to bioplastics, concrete additives, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, hygienic products and many more.
Let’s support startups and scale-ups to successfully bring their seaweed derived products to market.
A Fresh Perspective
Seaweed and its constituents are an almost blank canvas, waiting to be explored
Seaweeds contains many valuable biomolecules, and the increasing availability of large volumes of seaweed creates a realistic opportunity to supply these molecules to high demand markets. All seaweed species contain proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, fats and lots of water. Seaweed molecules are adapted to the marine environment and therefore, while there are similarities with their land-based equivalents, they are not the same.
Technologies that were developed to work on land-based biomass can be applied on seaweed, but such technologies must be adapted to work optimally with the new material, seaweed. For instance, biogas is traditionally produced from agricultural waste. Seaweed carbohydrates can also be used as input material, but huge volumes of seaweed are required to make a meaningful impact in the fossil energy market.
Therefore, the volume and cost of required seaweed never allowed for a profitable business case when using seaweed as input source for biogas production. However, through changes in technology (combining biogas production with the extraction of other valuable biomolecules) and circumstance (the availability of large amount of seaweed), biogas production from seaweed is becoming a viable option.
Let’s explore the components of seaweed and assess their economic value, while keeping our technology, clean and green.
GOA’s Technology
Seaweed carbohydrates have many applications, including fermentation and biomaterials like fabrics or plastics
GOA Ventures was founded on the idea to use seaweed-derived carbohydrates as an input for biogas production. Tests with various seaweed species confirmed that the technology was viable. However, in western Europe, the business case was not viable due to the high production cost of seaweed, expensive hardware and low prices for biogas.
In other regions, the economics are different. For example, Caribbean resort owners are willing to pay to keep seaweed off their beaches. As a consequence, the acquisition of seaweed biomass could be a revenue stream instead of a cost.. Additionally, hardware costs have decreased substantially through advances in GOA’s processing technology.
Lastly, there are many regions where supply of energy is a huge logistical challenge and requires expensive logistic costs to ship energy over long distance. In those regions, the price of energy is higher, making local biogas production from seaweed a more favourable option. GOA’s technology is changing the economic picture. GOA allows for the extraction of multiple value stream from each kilo (lbs) of seaweed and as such the economic outlook of utlising seaweed is substanlliy changed as well.
These changes allow a more attractive business cases and entry of investors and entrepreneurs. Now we have to change routines in the seaweed industry.
Let’s support faster realisation of novel technologies, while remaining critical of their cost/benefit ratio as well as the local environmental impact.
Seaweed Protein
We offer a new business model for seaweed,
where fresh is the future. Let’s focus on the most sustainable, flexible way forward.
To make the business case more favourable, extracting more valuable products from each kilogram of seaweed is essential. Seaweed contains nutritious and functional components, like protein that are very suitable for application in human food products. As the world transitions from animal-based proteins to plant-based proteins, seaweed proteins are a promising alternative to animal derived proteins.
GOA Ventures has patented a technology to extract protein-rich fractions from seaweed and convert the remaining carbohydrates into biogas. Seaweed proteins contain all essential amino acids and are highly digestible, making them nutritionally valuable. Additionally, they have functional value and show e.g. gelling, foaming and emulsifying properties. Seaweed proteins naturally function in high-salt environments, making them easily soluble across a wide range of ionic strengths and pH levels. Their dual value (nutritional and functional) makes seaweed protein extracts significantly more valuable than traditionally projected value for seaweed proteins.
The functional value of GOA’s seaweed proteins originates from our approach to processing. In traditional seaweed R&D, seaweed is harvested, sun- or heat dried and then shipped to a lab or processing facility where the dried material is rehydrated before extraction of valuable components like protein.
There are two big mistakes in this approach. First, drying seaweed will destroy the protein functionality – similar to boiling an egg. You can still eat a boiled egg, but cannot use it for a meringue or mayonnaise like you could use a raw egg. Second, drying seaweed, only to rehydrate it again, consumes a large amount of energy.
This is neither sustainable nor commercially viable. Therefore, GOA processes seaweed fresh, avoiding energy-intensive drying steps and preserving valuable biomolecules. This approach requires short supply lines, limiting time between harvest and processing.
Therefore, GOA takes the facility to the seaweed, rather than transporting dried or frozen seaweed to a processing facility. We have collaborated with universities and shipping companies to design processing facilities on harvesting vessels, allowing for synchronized harvesting and processing.
Let’s feed humanity with sustainable seaweed protein. Two tons of fresh seaweed can provide the annual protein needs for one adult.
GOA’s Business Model
Let’s ensure a flexible factory setup that can be adapted easily to match local seaweed species and market requirements
The GOA business model is based on the supply of turnkey seaweed processing facilities. GOA works closely with local seaweed entrepreneurs, sharing the knowledge and network to maximize seaweed value. Before investing in a commercial plant, GOA proposes several risk mitigating steps:
- Identify abundant local seaweed species.
- Test these species in GOA labs for compatibility with GOA technology and create initial business case insights.
- Invest in a small pilot plant running 24/7 with local seaweed (1 ton wet weight per day) to demonstrate product yield and quality over a full seaweed growth season. This pilot plant provides data for commercial operation design and detailed insight into the commercial business case.
- If the business case compiled out of pilot plant data results in positive outlook, investments in commercial operations are justified. Plants can be modular, ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 tons of wet weight seaweed per year, and can be (partially) mounted on harvesting vessels.
Seaweed valorisation can progress quickly if we properly derisk according to technical, commercial, and financial requirements.
Disrupting the Seaweed Economy
Seaweed offers great opportunities if you are willing to think outside the box and collaborate with all stakeholders
GOA claims to disrupt the seaweed economy by utilizing this rapidly growing source of biomolecules in innovative ways. By creating multiple value streams from each kilogram of seaweed and adapting to local needs, GOA technology turns sceptics (“Seaweed is too expensive” and “There isn’t enough seaweed”) into believers.
The oceans are supporting our business case: seaweed grows faster and in larger quantities both in seaweed farms and as ‘’nuisance’’ seaweed, reducing raw material costs.
The flexible GOA technology allows fresh processing, yielding higher value at lower costs and greater ecological benefit, and allows products to be adjusted to local needs. This combination is what makes GOA Ventures’ offering unique.
Let’s align on the costs and benefits across the entire value chain to capture the highest value for nature and all involved.
