Turning a seaweed crisis into an energy opportunity

After mixing wastewater from the rum distillery with sargassum, they ran some experiments in the lab. “And the thing is, it worked!” says Henry, who has a master’s in mechanical engineering from MIT and a PhD from the University of the West Indies (where she is a lecturer). Microbes in the mix fed on sugar in the wastewater and digested the seaweed—and what Henry thought might turn out to be a “nice paper” has since become what she calls a “game changer.” Sargassum, which has been distributed by ocean currents to become the world’s largest macroalgal bloom, fills over 800 dump trucks on a bad day in Barbados. But thanks to this research, instead of being taken to a landfill, the seaweed can now be converted into renewable natural gas to fuel cars. (In addition to the distillery wastewater, manure from local Blackbelly sheep is often in the mix.) “All the islands in this region of the Caribbean have a sargassum problem and a rum wastewater problem—and ultimately a climate-change probl ... Read full article.