When we think of the ocean, we often think of water full of life – like fish, whales, coral reefs and seaweed.
In reality, most of the World Ocean is a lifeless desert, where barely any life form can survive.
These areas are neither populated by wild life nor human activity – this is an opportunity to produce energy without competing for resources.
65% of Earth is covered by open ocean
Yet only 24.4% of Earth's primary photosynthetic productivity comes from the open ocean
The open ocean produces biomass at merely 5% the rate of coral reefs and algal beds.
Carbon is found everywhere – stored in the ocean, the atmosphere, and the crust of the earth. Carbon could spend millions of years moving through Earth in a complex cycle. A part of that, the ocean, acts as a carbon sink and can hold large amounts of carbon—about 50 times more than in the atmosphere.
This natural ebb and flow is exacerbated by man’s greenhouse gas pollution. So, understanding the carbon cycle is key to understanding Earth’s changing climate and how we can utilize it to effect positive change.
The ocean captures carbon through physical and biological processes, from CO2 dissolving into the water from the surface to the life cycle of marine organisms downwards. Over time, it has made the ocean floor a large reservoir of carbon. Much of the ocean’s nutrients lie in its cold depths. Via a process known as upwelling, currents carry carbon and nutrients to the top. Carbon is released as a gas back into the atmosphere, continuing the carbon cycle. By cycling huge amounts of carbon, the ocean helps bring order to the climate.
Studies state that to keep global average temperatures within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, greenhouse gas emissions must reach net zero by 2050. To reach a climate-neutral world, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is required to counteract heavy emissions from industrial sectors. The oceans are already a great tool to regulate Earth’s climate and we can greatly accelerate the removal of carbon from our atmosphere by deploying artificial downwelling. Induced by pumps, artificial downwelling enhances the downward movement of cold CO2-saturated surface waters into the depths of the ocean floor for storage up to hundreds, even thousands of years.
Enabling scalable carbon removal at low cost, without increasing ocean acidification.
Utilize the captured carbon as nutrition of Cyanobacteria and increasing photofuel production.
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We're a team of experienced engineers and researchers who share a passion for solving the big problems with practical solutions.
Desert Ocean Renewable Fuels and Chemicals was developed from technology spin-outs of Uppsala University and the EU Photofuel project.
Passionate about
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Our technology does not require investment of trillions of dollars to create an electric infrastructure to store and distribute huge amount of energy.
What we have
The concept is very designed to be very scalable and cost efficient, since the challenge to replace fossil resources is at a scale that humanity has not experienced ever before.
We want to replace fossil resources with CO2-negative, sustainable supplies in a way that does not;
compete with food production
require mining for copper, cobalt, aluminum, lithium or rare earth metals,
necessitate cooperation with dictatorships
jeopardize wild life or interfere with human habitats
Self sustaining after installation
Uses automation and remote operability
Needs no external energy nor raw materials
Our solutions are designed according to the principles of circularity and holistic system thinking.
We believe that it should be easy to do the right thing.
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We use an organism capable of taking sunlight to convert CO2 and H2O into Butanol with high productivity and carbon efficiency, well proven in laboratory environment.
We have a proprietary concept for cultivation of this organism developed specially for the environment on the Desert Oceans.
Photosynthetic cyanobacteria metabolizing carbon dioxide and water
Optimized for producing energy-dense liquid carbohydrates
Built in fail-safe mechanism to protect natural life
Image (by NASA): The dark blue areas show the largest lifeless areas on our planet. Great potential for harvesting energy and resources!
