| Executive Summary: | The OTEC powered open ocean aquaculture system we have designed reduces the cost of operation significantly by eliminating the need for fossil fuels to power the Oceansphere™ and keep them on station. It also eliminates the need to tether such systems to the ocean floor which is expensive and fraught with engineering and regulatory headaches. Other environmental advantages of our approach include reducing the carbon footprint associated with traditional fishing methods. It also allows aquaculture operations the flexibility to move their fish farming assets to different locations as sea conditions change. World demand for fish protein exceeds what the ocean can sustainably produce, and wild fish stocks, such as bluefin, bigeye and yellow fin tuna are rapidly being depleted along with many other species. Inland aquaculture products from Asia make up 50% of US imports which exceed $12 billion per year, our second largest import behind oil. Successfully deploying a next generation aquaculture system capable of operating in deep ocean waters away from the shore could create a new economically viable strategy for industrial scale open ocean fish farming to meet the world’s insatiable demand for fish protein. |
