Fearless Fund – Washington, DC. Ocean Energy from Macroalgae (OEM): Ranching Sargassum (Category I) – $500,000
The Fearless Fund team will develop a new system to enable large-scale seaweed “ranching” using remote sensing and imaging technologies to monitor free-floating, low-impact Sargassum cultivation designed to mimic naturally occurring seaweed mats found in nature. Free-floating farms decouple biomass production from costly, capital-intensive infrastructure and present opportunities to scale production in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. Working along the Texas/Louisiana coastline, the team will use satellite technology and computational modeling to seed, monitor, and harvest Sargassum biomass over a three-month cultivation cycle. By leveraging the wealth of data generated from a suite of sensors, the team seeks to achieve largescale farming without the need for capital-intensive infrastructure.
The full list of MARINER projects can be found here.