With its combined harvester,' an Indian business might transform the ocean farming.

 Seaweed, which is commonly used to wrap sushi and flavor soups has much more potential as a food and in a variety of applications ranging from pharmaceuticals and clothing to biodegradable materials and indeed biofuel.

Seaweed is usually cultivated in the water on ropes or nets, although modern processes create huge production nearly difficult. According to Shrikumar Suryanarayan, co-founder and CEO of India Sea6 Energy and former head of research and development at Biocon, an Indian pharmaceutical business focusing on biologically-sourced pharmaceuticals, ocean farming is still in the "stone ages." "It's like farming with a shovel and a picker."

With its "Sea Combine," a computerized catamaran that gathers and replants seaweed in the ocean, Sea6 Energy, which was founded in 2010, hopes to mechanize ocean farming in the same way that tractors did for farmland.

The machine moves back and forth between seaweed lines, collecting mature plants and replanting them with newly seeded lines.

A prototype is now being tested off the coast of Indonesia at the company's seaweed farm. According to Suryanarayan, the Southeast Asian nation has a long tradition of seaweed farming, which entails residents attaching bits of seaweed to ropes and dragging them out to sea before physically collecting the lines. The business plans to deploy additional Sea Combines as technology advances and the industry expands, especially in its native nation of India.

As per analytics company Fortune Business Insights, although the global seaweed sector grew in size between 2005 and 2015, producing 33 million metric tonnes in 2018, labor-intensive and expensive production is expected to stymie market growth.

According to Suryanarayan, the price of seaweed limits its potential applications, and in today's market, seaweed is often only financially sustainable for high-priced food uses.

Suryanarayan expects that the Sea Combine will reduce prices and make seaweed more affordable, allowing it to be utilized more extensively.

He believes that doing so will not harm local lives since village cooperatives will be able to lease the equipment, permitting them to farm a bigger area.

Fuel and food

According to Suryanarayan, the Sea Combine is only "a tool" in Sea6 Energy's larger business. According to him, the firm, which has garnered $20 million in investment, and now utilizes the seaweed gathered by the machine to make small-scale items like animal feed and agricultural fertilizer.

While Suryanarayan concedes the company's progress has been gradual, owing in part to a lack of funding in its early years, he feels it is now at an "inflection moment," with the foundations set, technology developed, and widespread interest in seaweed's ability to combat climate change.

The company's next move is to extend its line of seaweed-based goods, beginning with biopolymers, which it hopes to start producing within the next 4 years.

The EU has funded research on seaweed as a recyclable substitute for plastic over the past decade. Notpla, a London-based business, has already utilized seaweed to produce biodegradable drink and sauce containers.

Sea6 Energy is now working on its biopolymer to start replacing plastic and paper baggage.

The company's greatest objective, though, is to transform seaweed into biofuel, reducing India's reliance on crude oil. The company's scientific study indicates that it is technically doable, but Suryanarayan acknowledges that there is still a still far to go until becomes financially viable.

Vincent Doumeizel, head of the Lloyd's Register Foundation's Food Programme and senior advisor at the UN Global Compact (UNGC), the UN's corporate sustainability effort, is suspicious. "To create a few liters of oil, we'd need thousands and acres of seaweed," he tells CNN Business. "Using seaweed for biofuel is equivalent to using diamonds for pebbles in my opinion."

Instead, Sea6 Energy, according to Doumeizel, should concentrate on spaces where seaweed can make an instant influence. Because it contains substances that stop microbes in a cow's gut from producing methane, seaweed-enriched cattle feed can reduce bovine methane emissions; biodegradable plastics could play a part in carbon reduction; and the nutrient-dense plants could help support the increasing world population, he says.

But first, industry funding must increase, according to Doumeizel, who applauds firms who are developing technologies for large-scale production.

In this, Sea6 Energy is not alone. Seaweed Solutions of Norway created the "Seaweed Carrier," a sheet-like device capable of growing vast amounts of kelp in deep water and AtSeaNova of Belgium created a mobile seeding and harvesting system.

"One of the methods... to improve the planet's stability is through sea agriculture," adds Suryanarayan. "If we can prove that it is economically feasible, our job and mission will be fully accomplished."