Three Beneficial Ocean Projects

Here are three innovative ocean projects that improve water quality, provide healthful food, capture carbon, and generate renewable energy.

A seagrass restoration project restores marine ecosystem with numerous benefits – boosts marine life, and commercial fishing, purifies water, protects coastline, and even traps and stores microplastics.  Seagrass thrives if water quality is good and dies off if it is not. Threats to seagrass and water quality include coastal development, nutrient runoff from agriculture and stormwater, and rising ocean temperatures.

Regenerative ocean farmers are growing kelp (“wonder crop”) for not only healthy omega-3 snacks, but also as a food ingredient, fertilizer and compost, and compostable packaging materials (bioplastics).

Similar to trees, seagrass and seaweed capture carbons, too. World Bank did a study where it found that growing seaweed in 5 percent of U.S. waters could sequester the carbon-output equivalent of 20 million cars. Today, there is a growing market for carbon credits and offsets derived from kelp farms. 

Still in the R&D phase, transforming ocean waves into renewable energy just got a federal funding boost.  Selected projects will be testing wave energy convertor technology.  Selected projects will undertake their research at the Oregon PacWave South facility.  Plans are for the site to be operational in 2023. Projects will focus on testing wave energy convertor tech, wave energy R&D, advancing wave energy converter designs for PacWave.