From ocean entrepreneurs to impact investors to innovators, the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation’s Ocean Innovators Platform (OIP) brings you conversations with change makers dedicated to a sustainable blue economy.
In this episode, we sit down with John Auckland, the Co-Founder and CEO of Seafields, a blue carbon technology company and project developer. John shares insights into Seafields’ innovative approach to restoring ocean biodiversity and mitigating carbon emissions through the cultivation and processing of floating seaweed, Sargassum. As we delve into topics ranging from carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to scaling up solutions for the ocean, John provides valuable perspectives on the role of science in accelerating progress in the ocean space.
So my name’s John Oakland I’m the co-founder and CEO of seafields seafields is an aqua farming company that’s going to farm cultivate harvest the round floating algae sasm for the purposes of carbon Removement carbon dioxide removal is an absolutely essential tool in the Arsenal of climate change mitigation so at the moment uh humanity is going to even the best case scenarios of decarbonization we’re going to be left with about 10 gatons of unavoidable emissions carbon dioxide removal is absolutely essential
To mitigate those final 10 gatons perom the ipcc has also stated that 30% of uh historic anthropogenic commissions also needs to be removed so we need to find Pathways to be able to remove all of that Car Marine CDR is in many ways more important than terrestrial CDR because the ocean is a larger surface area it’s 71% of the planet’s surface it’s also a three-dimensional environment so you kind of have more space to work with it you think land is kind of only two-
Dimensional in many respects um the other thing about the ocean is that it’s much faster and easier to access the deep ocean where we can store the carbon uh in what we call the slow moving carbon cycle where it’s much less vulnerable to climate change right if we
Store all of this carbon in trees and in plants and in the soil uh actually that’s quite exposed to um climate changes that will then potentially re-release that carbon back out again the ocean’s really exciting because there’s lots of different methods we can use to remove carbon both from the
Atmosphere and the upper layer of the ocean which would then create an equilibri in the atmosphere anyway so we can look at growing seaweed for example we can grow lots of seaweed which photosynthesizes uses Nature’s Best technique for drawing down se2 locks it in the plant biomass then we can sink
That to the bottom of the ocean where it will stay forever so that’s the one that se is focusing on but there’s loads of other really exciting things as well such as ocean alkalinity enhancement such as artificial upwelling um ocean iron fertilization you know there really
Is quite a long list of things we can do some of which we know quite well some of which are really nent in terms of our understanding of the science the science we’ve done so far really is a drop in the ocean we need a lot of investment into this space uh
It’s very easy to do research on land right which is why we we’ve done a lot of research also we’re very familiar with the land so it’s not kind of scary to us there’s this assumption it’s a very wrong assumption that anything we do in the ocean is um you know it’s kind
Of brushing our mess somewhere else or somewhere that we can’t see or somewhere that we don’t understand we actually understand a lot about the ocean but just very very few areas of the ocean because it is so vast so we can focus on those areas that we have a lot of
Knowledge and that’s where our kind of existing science um I think we only know about 5% the oceans um but that’s still a huge amount of area um so we need more research into the characterization of different areas of the ocean so we know where it’s safe to do activities where
It’s not safe um and we also then need to find a new way of fostering private public and uh academic collaboration so that we can accelerate that research in a way that’s never been done before my positive message to inspire change is that you know I genuinely considered not having children because I
Was worried about the world that I was bringing them into um I started getting into this impact space into the carbon dioxide removal space then the mcdr space and that gave me a new kind of Hope um there are lots of very very clever people working on Solutions
Nature’s already a very very powerful um carbon dioxide capture um sort of proponent right we just need to help nature um and I know a lot of very clever people are for working on that that’s going me hope and it should should do with you [Applause] to