Scotland’s kelp harvest must be processed within 24 hours of cutting, but the harvest season lasts only six to eight weeks—so the entire year’s crop rots unless it is dried or frozen, which costs up to £100 per wet tonne and makes biorefining uneconomical. This project tackles that bottleneck. KALY, a Skye-based kelp farming start-up, Oceanium, an Oban-based seaweed processor, and the James Hutton Institute will develop low-cost chemical stabilisation methods that keep harvested kelp usable for months without freezing or drying. The goal is to cut stabilisation costs from roughly £2,500 per wet tonne at current tiny production scales to under £10 per wet tonne, while scaling Scottish farmed seaweed output to around 20,000 wet tonnes per year. If successful, the stabilised seaweed price could fall to £570 per wet tonne, making year-round biorefining commercially viable. That would unlock a steady supply of kelp-derived ingredients for food, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, and biomaterials such as packaging and inks—replacing fossil-based inputs in supply chains that most people never see, but that underpin manufacturing across multiple industries.
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With its extensive nutrient-rich coastline and world-leading expertise in industrial biotechnology innovation, marine science, and aquaculture, Scotland has the potential to lead the UK and the western world in the development of a sustainable seaweed farming industry. Sustainably farmed seaweed can be processed in innovative biorefineries, producing multiple high-value products for food, nutraceutical, cosmetic, and biomaterial applications. However, scaling of seaweed biorefinery processing faces a significant bottleneck. Seaweed is highly perishable and freshly harvested seaweed must be bio-refined within 24 h of harvesting. Since the harvest period for farmed seaweed is only 6-8 weeks, biorefining the entire harvest in this window would require the installation of prohibitively high CAPEX biorefineries. Seaweed stabilisation should allow for year-round processing. However, the industry standard remains drying and freezing. This is not only highly energy intensive, but prohibitively expensive for sustainably farmed UK seaweed. Currently, UK-based seaweed drying and freezing costs c.£100/wet-tonne and £40/wet-tonne. With the UK having amongst the highest industrial energy costs in the world, there is a significant impetus to develop less energy-intensive and, thus, less costly stabilisation processes. Although stabilised sustainably farmed Scottish seaweed currently costs £2,500/wet-tonne (with farms at <1 tonne production scale and relying on drying/freezing for stabilisation), scaling of sustainably farmed seaweed production to c.20,000 wet-tonnes/year and reducing the stabilisation cost to <£10/wet-tonne are expected to reduce the stabilised sustainably farmed Scottish seaweed price to £570/wet-tonne, which will deliver technoeconomic biorefinery process viability. Consequently, low-cost (<£10/wet-tonne), low-energy, and environmentally benign stabilisation processes are urgently required to unlock year-round sustainably farmed seaweed supply for biorefinery processing. KALY is a Skye-based kelp farming and primary processing start-up, with a licensed 400 wet-tonne seaweed farm in Loch Bay and options for a further 3,000 wet-tonnes, harvesting 0.15 wet-tonnes in pilot-scale trials in May 2024\. Oceanium is an Oban-based seaweed offtaker, with proprietary biorefinery process technology to extract maximum value from sustainably farmed seaweed, processing 75 wet-tonnes of UK/European sustainably farmed seaweed in 2023 into commercially ready bioactives and fibre for food, nutraceutical, and cosmetic applications, with additional biomaterial (including packaging and inks) applications in development. The James Hutton Institute (JHI) is a Dundee-based crop and environmental research institute with expertise in seaweed compositional analysis. With public funding through Bio-based Manufacturing, Scotland - Rd2 CR&D, KALY, Oceanium, and JHI will develop and scale up low-cost, low-energy, environmentally benign chemical stabilisation strategies for sustainably farmed kelp that are compatible with seaweed biorefining.
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