Carbon heave? How can one heave carbon out from the oceans? By growing kelp in it (well, and then heaving that out of the water).
Imagine underwater forests working like giant vacuum cleaners! Kelp, a fast-growing seaweed, absorbs dissolved carbon dioxide from the ocean as it thrives. When kelp is removed or forced to sink to the deep ocean floor, it takes the captured carbon with it. This natural process can be accelerated by cultivating kelp farms. By promoting kelp growth, we can help reduce ocean acidity, pump in oxygen for living organisms, remove excess nutrients from mainland farming residues and remove the excess CO2 in the air as well, all in one go.
Aside from just being a tool of carbon removal, it also provides shelter for different kind water creatures and most importantly their juvenile.
But aren’t there other methods to combat climate change?
Sure, the current aim of governments and companies is to invest heavily into green energy like solar power plants, wind turbines and even nuclear plants, but none of these three remove a single unit of CO2 that is in the atmosphere already. Our aim is to tackle that.
Many companies are driving towards being carbon neutral. We aim at being carbon negative. To bind more carbon than we create.
Is kelp farming something new?
No, humans have farmed kelp for a long while, we just want to take the growing and post-processing to a whole new level. Aside from just using it as food or fertilizer we can turn it into a solid carbon storage, long lasting fuel reserves. And while the latter might be counter intuitive to our goal, some countries would be really happy to have co2 neutral fuel provided from the ocean. If we do it half and half (storage and fuel production) we still combat the CO2 increase over all.
Our initial research targets
While our eventual goal will be to grow Giant Kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) our initial experiments will have to performed with Sugar Kelp (Saccharina latissima) or a native to Estonia’s waters Bladder Wrack (Fucus vesiculosus). While they do differ in conditions and speed of growth, they are all different species of brown algae by nature.