Offshore Seaweed and Renewable Farms: Solutions for Integration and Co-location

Confirmation seminar presented by Chenxuan Huang.

This PhD project is concerned with the development in integrating/co-locating offshore seaweed cultivation farm and renewable energy production farm. The project is funded by the Blue Economy CRC and is carried out in collaboration with the Climate Foundation Australia. In the first phase of the project, we focused on developing various offshore seaweed cultivation infrastructure that are storm proof and capable of depth cycling for accelerating seaweed growth. So far, three large-scale offshore seaweed cultivation infrastructure were developed and two of these have been trialled in Cebu (the Philippines) waters. This report summarized the work done on the analysis and design of these seaweed cultivation infrastructure. In the next phases of the project, research effort would be directed towards identifying the appropriate offshore renewable energy farm as well as how best offshore seaweed and renewable energy infrastructure could be integrated/co-located to maximize the benefits of having both farms together. A few potential sites in Australia for running the integrated or co-located farms will be considered. The economic, engineering and environmental aspects of integrated or coexisting farms will be studied and compared with isolated farms used only for seaweed cultivation or renewable energy.