Since 2011, enormous seaweed blooms have spread across the Atlantic Ocean, spanning 5,000 miles from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. 

While supporting a unique ecosystem for a host of marine life when floating in the open ocean, Sargassum seaweed has proven to be an economic and environmental disaster when large mats of it wash ashore and decay. In 2018 alone, attempts to clean it up from beaches across the Caribbean totaled around $120 million. 

Now, a Princeton-led team of researchers from eight institutions and an industry partner are transforming this seaweed from burden to boon. Harnessing the tools of bioengineering, they are developing processes to convert Sargassum into valuable products including fuels, chemicals, and fertilizers. The researchers believe their biorefinery process could ultimately support a new type of sustainable economic growth across the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, in which Sargassum is reimagined from a disaster to an opportunity. 

“At an oil refinery, you have one input — petroleum — and convert it into dozens of products like gasoline, petrochemicals, and plastics,” said lead investigator José Avalos, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute. “Here, we’re developing similar processes, but we’re using a seaweed as a renewable and sustainable feedstock.”