BLUE BUSINESS: Power and comms
The world’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Lolland, Denmark, in 1991. Since then, the global installed capacity has grown to nearly 35 gigawatts – enough to power the entire UK – almost all of it in European (25 GW) and Chinese (9 GW) waters. Other sources of ocean renewable energy are also being eyed up, including waves, tides, currents, salinity gradients, thermal gradients and marine biomass. The EU has a target of installing 1 GW of these alternative sources by 2030, says Benjamin Lehner at the .
All these figures are a drop in the ocean compared with the world’s . Yet with wind power generation getting cheaper all the time – – rapid growth looks like a foregone conclusion. The trade association Wind Europe estimates that, by 2050, Europe will have 450 GW of offshore wind.
That brings its own challenges. It will require about 45,000 square kilometres of ocean, most of it between 11 and 22 kilometres from shore, the goldilocks zone for offshore wind. Europe has 550,000 square kilometres of this real estate in total, but more than 60 per cent is earmarked for marine protected areas, says António Sarmento at consultancy firm WavEC Offshore Renewables in Lisbon, Portugal. Building, operating and maintaining offshore wind farms can damage the seabed, while the power cables that carry electricity to shore emit electromagnetic fields to which some species are sensitive.
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A possible answer, says Sarmento, is the “multi-use of maritime space” – combining wind farms with marine protected areas and adding in seaweed and shellfish farming. “We can create economic value, we can create local jobs and we can do something in benefit of the environment,” he says.
Meanwhile, around 99 per cent of international telecommunications is carried by undersea fibre-optic cables. The current network, known as the “cloud beneath the sea”, stretches for and is lengthening constantly as demand for bandwidth grows.
Cables are either buried in the sediment or simply laid on the sea floor. Both have a minimal ecological footprint, says , New Zealand, who was marine environmental adviser for the . In fact, cables can have a positive effect on the environment, as critical infrastructure for sustainable development in lower-income parts of the world and a barrier to destructive trawling of the seabed for fish. The very first marine cable, a telegraph line laid between Dover and Calais in 1850, was .
BLUE BUSINESS: DEEP-SEA MINING
Minerals companies have been coveting the deep seabed since the 1960s. According to , deep-sea mining could grow from essentially zero today into a $15-billion industry by 2030.
The International Seabed Authority, established in 1994 to regulate the industry’s development, has handed out 31 . But it can’t yet authorise commercial deep-sea mining operations as its member states are still thrashing out the rules.
That could be about to change. In June 2021, the Pacific island state of Nauru demanding that the rules be finalised within two years. It is acting as a state sponsor for a private firm, , based in Vancouver, Canada, that wants to develop a mine not near Nauru, but at the eastern end of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), on the other side of the Pacific Ocean roughly between Hawaii and Mexico.
The CCZ is thick with potato-sized metallic nodules rich in nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, all critical metals for the green energy transition. The nodules lie on the seabed and The Metals Company describes its planned operation as “collection” rather than mining. It and other proponents of deep-sea mining claim this approach is environmentally more benign than mining on land. The CCZ is mostly abyssal plain, the most common type of environment on Earth, covering about a third of the ocean floor. “It is pitch black, cold, high pressure and food-poor, resulting in 1500 times less biomass than in a rainforest,” says Rory Usher at The Metals Company. “It is essentially a desert.”
Others disagree. “There is remarkable diversity in these areas,” says . “We find many species here that rely on the nodules, using that hard platform of a nodule to grow off, like sponges and anemones, and we’re still encountering dozens of new species each time an expedition goes there.” The denser the nodules in an area, the richer the biodiversity, she says.
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Two other sources of deep-sea metal ores have mining companies salivating: sulphides found around hydrothermal vents, and cobalt crusts covering flat-topped seamounts called guyots. Exploiting both is much more destructive than plucking loose nodules off the abyssal plain.
Nautilus Minerals, a Canadian company in which the government of Papua New Guinea held a stake, attempted to mine hydrothermal vents in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea, starting in 2011. The venture . For now, the CCZ is the only part of the deep seabed outside national territorial waters in play for mining as it is the only area for which the International Seabed Authority has completed a mandatory piece of paperwork called a .
But Nauru may also have accessible minerals inside its own waters, which could be exploited once a deep-sea mining industry is established in the CCZ. Other island nations have signalled their intent to go down that road: the , for example, has nodules galore and , even though its waters are designated as a marine protected zone. Such plans within territorial waters are beyond the reach of the International Seabed Authority. Around kilometres of seabed under national jurisdiction are under exploration for mining.
BLUE BUSINESS: AQUACULTURE
Humans eat seafood in copious quantity and variety. Annual global consumption is around , about a third of all of the animal flesh eaten in total, with demand forecast to double by 2050. More than 2000 species are consumed worldwide.
Even now, that has a devastating effect. Around 70 per cent of wild fish stocks are overfished, says Julian Barbière at UNESCO, while fishing methods such as bottom trawling are horribly destructive. Modern fishing vessels burn a lot of oil to chug around the ocean, haul their nets and refrigerate their catch, making the average carbon footprint of a kilogram of wild-caught fish greater than that of a kilogram of pork and approaching that of beef.
Overfishing meant hauls from wild-caught fisheries plateaued in the 1990s. Most growth in consumption since then has been supplied by farming, or aquaculture, which now provides half of the seafood eaten worldwide. It is no panacea, however. The Aichi targets on biodiversity, which were set in 2010 and expired in 2020, called for aquaculture to be “managed sustainably, ensuring conservation of biodiversity”. Along with all the other targets, it was . Among the charges against aquaculture are destruction of coastal wetlands, especially mangroves, huge energy cost and the inefficiencies of a system that relies on feeding small fry such as anchovies to larger fish.
The notion that aquaculture as currently practised can feed the world is nonsense, says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia in Canada. “Actually, it can feed the rich. It takes fish that were available to poor people and turns them into fish that are preferred by rich people. It’s as crude as that,” he says.
In 2021, Jessica Gephart at the American University in Washington DC and her colleagues took a deep dive into what they call , a catch-all category for anything edible from fresh water or the sea. That includes fish, shellfish and cephalopods, but also an aquarium of lesser-eaten creatures such as sea cucumbers, jellyfish, seaweed and microalgae. If managed carefully, they concluded, blue foods have a lot of room for sustainable growth. “There is such a thing as sustainably managed fisheries,” says John Virdin at Duke University in North Carolina. “It takes smart rules and enforcing those rules, but it can be done. And it’s not impossible to do aquaculture sustainably.”
Part of that is eating more seaweed and bivalves such as oysters and mussels, which have a minimal environmental impact and can be powerful carbon sinks. It may mean more salmon, which can thrive on a vegan diet and have a footprint comparable to rearing chickens, the most efficient form of land-based meat. Sea urchins also look promising. Farmed bluefin tuna isn’t the answer, but wild-caught tuna may be, provided the fishing industry switches to less energy-intensive trawlers and fishing gear.
BLUE BUSINESS: OCEAN BIOPROSPECTING
In 1951, bioprospectors from the drug company Pfizer of sponge they had discovered off Florida and the Bahamas. Named spongouridine, it was later developed into an antiviral called vidarabine, the world’s first-ever marine-derived drug.
Marine species are highly interesting to the biotech industry as they have evolved to live in extremes of pressure, temperature, chemistry and darkness not found on land, giving them potential biological superpowers likely to be useful in biomedicine and industrial applications. More than 34,000 natural products from the ocean have been identified as possibly useful to date, including one sponge-derived compound that was , the first treatment for HIV infection. Since 1988, some 13,000 marine genetic sequences from 865 marine species have been patented. Around three-quarters are from microorganisms, but genes have also been extracted from fish, crustaceans, corals, molluscs, sponges and even whales.
As yet, this bounty has only yielded a handful of actual products, but advances in remotely operated vehicles and sampling technologies is expected to spur it on. By 2025, the global market for marine biotechnology is projected to reach $6.4 billion, according to Jean-Baptiste Jouffray at Stockholm University, Sweden.
