Estimating production cost for large-scale seaweed farms

• DOI: 10.1080/26388081.2022.2111271
• Publication Date: 2022-11-12T08:10:43Z
• Authors: Hauke L. Kite-Powell; Erick Ask; Simona Augyte; David Bailey; Julie Decker; Clifford A. Goudey; Gretchen Grebe; Yaoguang Li; Scott Lindell; Domenic Manganelli; Michael Marty-Rivera; Crystal Ng; Loretta Roberson; Michael Stekoll; Schery Umanzor; Charles Yarish
• Keywords: Arable land; Tonne

Seaweed farming has the potential to produce feedstocks for many applications, including food, feeds, fertilizers, biostimulants, and biofuels. Seaweeds have advantages over land-based biomass in that they require no freshwater inputs allocation of arable land. To date, seaweed not been practiced at scales relevant meaningful biofuel production. Here we describe a techno-economic model large-scale farms its application cultivation cool temperate species Saccharina latissima (sugar kelp) tropical Eucheumatopsis isiformis. At farm 1000 ha or more, our suggests gate production costs waters up 200 km from onshore support base are likely range between $200 $300 per dry tonne. The also below $100 tonne may be achievable some settings, which would make these seaweeds economically competitive with feedstocks. While encouraging, results assumptions on based further field validation.