Leading from the front

Interest in cultivating seaweed is growing as its versatility becomes increasingly apparent.

Kattegat Seaweed is part of Davai, a company specialising, among other activities, in the service and maintenance of physical infrastructure such as bridges, wind turbines, and transformer stations. Investing in seaweed stems from a conviction that a local company should be the first to find out whether a resource on its doorstep can be viably exploited.

Based in Grenaa, Kattegat Seaweed is betting on the demand for seaweed increasing in the future as research reveals more and more about marine algae and its applications. Already Nordisk Seaweed, another Grenaa company, is using marine macroalgae in a variety of products for human consumption and is planning to expand production to items that will require even greater volumes. Kattegat Seaweed, however, is focused on the first part of the value chain – producing the seaweed by cultivating it or possibly by harvesting it from the wild.

To this end the company has invested in a vessel that will be used to test harvest at a site about an hour’s sailing away from Grenaa. The vessel was originally an oil boat supplying ships with fuel. Davai has converted it into a work boat equipped with a crane, a restructuring project that was partly funded by the FLAG Djursland. Farming seaweed is about putting out the lines the anchors and the buoys and then waiting for the seaweed to grow. Kim Brueld Olesen, the managing director of Davai, and a former fisherman himself, feels that some of the methods used for traditional fishing might also be used to harvest seaweed. He thinks that harvesting seaweed is likely to be an overwhelmingly manual job, which for fishermen is hardly something they are unfamiliar with as fishing too involves much manual work. This is fortunate because, as he says, the pool of people from which people to do this work can be hired is largely one of fishermen.

Growing seaweed has to take unpredictable weather into account

The site where the seaweed is grown is offshore in the open sea and is completely exposed to the elements so that there is only a limited window when the work can be carried out. The weather is too unpredictable to permit activity over long periods. However, Mr Brueld Olesen, thinks that it should be possible to sail to the site, remove the lines growing seaweed from the bearing rope, heave them on board, and sail back again before the weather turns. The lines are brought ashore, the seaweed is cut off, they are then returned to sea and re-attached to the bearing rope. He emphasises that it is important to cut rather than tear the seaweed off as the latter would destroy the root. And his calculations show that it is necessary to preserve the root so that a total of three crops can be harvested from the same root. Doing it this way rather than trying to carry out the entire operation at sea he thinks is more flexible and more convenient for the people who actually do the work. For a coastal fisherman working with seaweed like this is much like working with fish – instead of emptying his nets and bringing the fish back, he will be emptying the bearing rope and bringing seaweed back. Depending on how the regulatory framework develops, this model should work irrespective of the number of lines that are growing the seaweed. There are synergies with fishing too in that the seaweed can be grown in areas that are ignored by fishermen because they are difficult to fish. Additionally, today when fishers capture seaweed in their nets it is a problem; the seaweed has no value and time must be spent cleaning out the nets. If the project leads to a market developing for seaweed, the fisherman could then sell the material that gets caught in his net. Even small coastal fishers could have a 1 cubic m tank on board the vessel, where they could collect the seaweed. This product would, however, not be for human consumption, but as a supplement to animal feed or as fertiliser. In other words, he may earn the same as what he would get for low-quality fish. Another idea is for fishers to use their old nets, which are no longer so efficient at catching fish, to catch seaweed instead. This is dead seaweed that rolls along the sea bed, and while it cannot be used for products that demand high quality raw materials, it can be used for other purposes.

Advertisements

Cultivating beats collecting in some respects

Today there is plenty of wild seaweed available, but if a market for seaweed develops, wild seaweed may go the same way as fish stocks, which is why cultivating it is an interesting alternative. The advantage of cultivating is also that one can select the best species to cultivate, production can be controlled, supplies are reliable, and the result will be a high quality product, that is used for human consumption or by the pharmaceutical or nutraceutical industry, and that commands a premium price. A high price is essential if the model is to work; 10-20% can be sold at a low price, but not more than that, he estimates. Collecting seaweed that is tossed by the sea on to the beach is another potential source of raw material, but one that will call for close cooperation with the municipalities. The seaweed will have to be collected each day to be usable, as within hours of arriving at the beach it starts to degrade. In the old days, a bailiff used to be responsible for a section of the beach, a position that perhaps should be re-introduced. Keeping the beach clear of seaweed will make it more attractive for the tourists in summer, an outcome a municipality should be interested in, making it a win-win situation.

Running the converted boat would call for two people and the collection of seaweed from the local beach would call for another person in summer and with this effort the yield should be a tonne of seaweed a day, which is also the lowest volume needed for the business to be viable. Once collected the seaweed should be brought ashore and cooled within eight hours to prevent it from degrading. It is therefore often harvested and then placed in a net in the sea to keep it at the right temperature. The alternative is to dry it so that it reaches a certain humidity and then to freeze it. Processed this way, the seaweed can be stored for up to two years. The company is therefore working on a container with sturdy shelves to hold the seaweed, which is quite heavy when it is wet. The main infrastructure needed to process the seaweed this way is drying machinery, such as dehumidifiers, that will need to be built, and a frozen storage. The dehumidifiers are no great challenge as this is equipment Davai is more than familiar with from its work maintaining bridges.

Ideas sometimes sparked by arbitrary events

Yet another idea was inspired by a vessel used to clean up the harbour in Istanbul. Manned by two people the craft uses a conveyor belt to bring rubbish from the harbour on board the vessel. A similar system could be used to collect seaweed that is floating in the water after a storm and before it reaches the beach. The advantage of collecting it this way at a depth of 1-2 m is that the seaweed is not covered in sand as it would be if collected from the beach, which saves on the
expense of having to clean it.

Mr Brueld Olesen has been living in the Grenaa area all his life, and if other companies were to come in from outside and “do what we were supposed to do,” that is, starting activities that could just have easily been initiated by his firm, he would consider this an embarrassment. Too often, he feels, Danish companies sit back and let others do the pioneering, and then try and follow, rather than leading from the start. He acknowledges that the activities in his other companies provide an insurance policy that enables him to embark on this seaweed project even if it does not lead to anything. But there are other reasons too for settling on seaweed, the marine environment is one, with which he is very familiar, it is something that will benefit the local area, and at the moment it is not taking significant human resources away from the other companies. If the project takes off and collecting the seaweed in the right quality is shown to be feasible the next issue would be to find a market. While Nordisk Tang is an obvious customer, its current monthly requirements do not exceed what Kattegat Seaweed expects to collect in a day. Other potential customers include seafood processing and exporting companies that are based in and around Grenaa. Turkey is also a potential market. Davai has just built three bridges in Turkey and now has a network of reliable contacts, whom it can draw on, if it decides to sell the seaweed there. The most important thing is to find the customers who buy into the story behind the seaweed – its healthfulness, quality, the fact that it is from clear Danish waters – and are willing to pay the price that will make it financially viable to produce it. The objective should not be to sell large volumes, but to find a level, where everything, price, quality, volume, is in balance.