Carbon SaFaRi - Google award

In order to claim the active removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through algae cultivation in the form of CO2 certificates, companies must overcome two main obstacles in the “Monitoring, Reporting and Verification” (MRV) process: 

1) The harvested biomass must be accurately quantified and its fate must be monitored. 

2) The transfer of nutrients from natural phytoplankton communities to algae, and the consequences of this, must be quantified and monitored. 

Our previous research within CDRmare sea4oCiety has shown that Sargassum carbon fixation may be spatially and temporally decoupled from nutrient availability and uptake, therefore a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms of nutrient storage in Sargassum is required. Stationary Sargassum aquafarms will be established off the Canary Islands (MacroCarbon) and in the Caribbean (Seafields) over the next 1-5 years. This will create a unique infrastructure for the continuous testing and development of the MRV technologies needed to validate this approach from the sea surface to the sea floor.

The main objectives of Carbon-SaFari are 1) to monitor the carbon and nutrient dynamics of pelagic Sargassum and 2) to quantify the amount and fate of sunk biomass in natural Sargassum populations in the Sargasso Sea and the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, as well as in the novel Sargassum aquafarms in the Caribbean and Canary Islands. The results of the field work in collaboration with the start-ups MacroCarbon and Seafields and the research cruises in collaboration with NIOZ will be incorporated into modeling. This modeling will be used to investigate and evaluate the global impact of this approach in order to pave the way for the introduction of CO2 certificates for floating algae aquafarms.