![]() ![]() The Sea Combine is just “a tool” in Sea6 Energy’s wider operation, says Suryanarayan. As the technology develops and the market widens, the company intends to deploy more Sea Combines, including in its home country, India. The Southeast Asian nation has a tradition of seaweed farming that involves villagers tying pieces of seaweed to ropes and hauling them out to sea, before manually harvesting the lines, and there is a strong appetite for the crop there, according to Suryanarayan. The machine travels back and forth between lines of seaweed, harvesting the fully-grown plants and replacing them with freshly-seeded lines.Ī prototype is currently deployed at the company’s seaweed farm off the coast of Indonesia. “It’s like using a trowel and a pick to farm land.”įounded in 2010, Sea6 Energy wants to mechanize ocean farming, just as tractors did for agriculture, with its “Sea Combine,” an automated catamaran that simultaneously harvests and replants seaweed in the ocean. ![]() Ocean farming is in the “stone ages,” according to Shrikumar Suryanarayan, co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-based Sea6 Energy and former head of research and development at Biocon, an Indian pharmaceutical company specializing in biologically-sourced medicines. Usually, seaweed is grown on ropes or nets suspended in the ocean, but current techniques make large-scale cultivation near impossible. Often used to wrap sushi and flavor soups, seaweed has much greater potential – both as a food and for use in a wide range of products from cosmetics and textiles to biodegradable packaging and even biofuel. ![]()
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