Kampachi Company Wins $3.3m Grant to Turn Seaweed into Food, Feed, Fuel

by Jason Huffman (Undercurrent News) The Kampachi Company may be best known for its recent efforts to grow “king kampachi”, aka kahala or almaco jack (Seriola rivoliana), in ocean-based cages, but it also is performing research with plans to make a play in the seaweed space.

The Kona, Hawaii-based company has just received a $3.3 million grant from the US Department of Energy (DoE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA‑E) program to further its efforts to convert marine macroalgae into biofuels and other useful products. It was one of 40 new projects for which the ARPA-E program recently awarded a combined $98m, according to a press release.

The grant is the second from ARPA-E for the company within a little more than a year. It received a $500,000 grant in October 2017.

The agency believes US offshore resources could support enough seaweed production to supply up to 10% of the current demand for transportation fuel and has cast "an envious eye on seaweed production in Asia and other parts of the world," the alternative energy publication Clean Technica reported more than a year ago.

"We see innovative aquaculture as a way to mend or mitigate that which ails the oceans … as a salve for the seas, if you will. If we can do this in a way that provides people with nutritious food, or that feeds fish which produce great-tasting sashimi, and then turn a profit at the same time, then that is the environmental/social/ governance triple trifecta."

The Kampachi Company isn't the only one trying to turn seaweed into fuel. National Public Radio's The Salt reported last year how the University of Southern California has been involved in research along the same lines, using a process called "thermochemical liquefaction".

The kelp is dried out, and the salt is washed away. Then it's turned into bio-oil through a high-temperature, high-pressure conversion process, the article explained.

The company's separately maintained macroalgae research team has been engaged in land-based trials, trying to identify the best seaweed species for scale-up offshore while also working closely with seaweed culture experts from Chile, where seaweed farming is an established industry, to better understand how to reproduce the vegetation in captivity, Sims told Undercurrrent.

The rudderfish are so efficient at digesting seaweed, however, that Kampachi Company's researchers believe they might be able to co-opt their gut microbiome to improve the efficiency of seaweed "bio-digestors", Sim said. The company is hoping to obtain a phase II award that will allow it to extend this work to offshore seaweed culture trials. READ MORE