The Ocean Restorer
Ocean Arks has a legacy of creating ocean-going vessels. After the Gulf Oil Spill in 2010, Oceans Arks applied our ecological design knowledge to how to serve the needs of the dramatically polluted and depleted open oceans.
What the Gulf needs are Ocean Restorers that are not anchored, but can be propelled through the water to increase dramatically the amount of pollution they can treat. We could achieve the needed propulsion by envisioning an Ocean Restorer that was also part ship, a catamaran that could move through the water with ecological technologies for treatment suspended between two hulls. The Ocean Restorer will be sail powered with five sails on each hull. The rig is very much like that of a traditional Chinese junk. There are many reasons for choosing this design. A number of years ago John sailed on a modern junk rigged vessel off the coastof England and was favorably impressed with the ease with which it could be handled. The sails do not flap, as they are fully battened. They are mounted so that they can swing freely and spill the wind ifnecessary. A third advantage is they do not requireheavy machinery to raise the sails or manage their trim. But most importantly the lack of flapping andthe balanced rig will allow the sails to be made from more fragile fabrics. There are now new materials that double as photovoltaic or solar cells. In our design each sail is both a propulsion device and a solar electric generating station, making the sails hybrid wind power/electrical generation devices. The prototype Ocean Restorer catamaran, at a hundred and thirty feet in length, will be capable of sailing at over twenty knots without its ecological technologies in place. With the eco-technologies lowered into the water between the hulls, our goal is a forward motion speed at a much slower 3 knots.
The relatively slow speed of the Restorer is due to the drag resistance of the suspended treatment technologies. If we can achieve an operational speed of three knots, the Restorer could treat up to one billion gallons a day. The most difficult design challenge will not be that of the solar/wind rig or the catamaran itself. This boat design requires straightforward naval architecture and marine engineering. The great challenge will be the design and ecological engineering of the treatment technologies.
We expect to have four distinct eco-technologies suspended down to a depth of ten feet. We currently envision that their designs will be inspired by and derived from four parent ecologies from the inshore oceans. The first ecology will be the sea grass communities that are the nurseries for so much of sea life. For years I have been using eelgrass communities as the basis for design of aquaculture systems that work beautifully.The second engineered ecology will be based upon oyster reef communities. This component of the purification system will have many species of clams, oysters and other mollusks. There is a technology used in marine mollusk farming known as upwellers.
Upwellers use natural currents and tides to deflect large volumes of water through chambers housing clams and other bivalves. This increases the amount of plankton food available to the cultured organisms. We are working on adapting this technology into the Restorer’s design. The third inspirational ecology is the forest-like algae community known as kelp that is common in northern waters. We will simulate kelp ecology with a special manufactured material that attracts and houses diverse marine communities that filter and
clean water.
The final ecological element in the Restorer’s complex food web will be communities known as algae turfs. They are like Lilliputian forests of attached algae made up of more than a dozen species of exquisitely shaped organisms. Algae turfs are well known for their ability to produce oxygen under daylight conditions and to also remove nutrients rapidly from the water.Once we obtain seed funding we plan to embark immediately on two tasks, hopefully in 2011. First, we will select a naval architect with experience in multihull and working craft design. The major question, needing resolution at the outset, is whether we should build a quarter scale model sixty feet in length.
Or would it be most effective to build the Ocean Restorer at full scale from the very outset? If so, the Restorer would be in the vicinity of a hundred and thirty feet in length and about forty-five in width.The second task will be to build prototypes of the four treatment systems and to establish their ecologies and then suspend the eco-technologies under the rafts. The rafts will be anchored in three to four knot currents just off the coast of Woods Hole on Cape Cod. We will measure the resistance or drag of the echnologies in the water. This information will feed back into the overall Restorer design. We need to learn how much sail area and electric power will be needed for propulsion. This work with the eco-technologies will tell us which organisms will establish themselves most readily and hopefully flourish. It will also teach us which of our life support infrastructures are best adapted to Ocean Restorers.
If we are successful I can foresee a day when the coastal seas of the world are patrolled around the clock and throughout the year with Ocean Restorers purifying their waters. From our earlier Restorer research we know that they will also double as attractors of such sea life as fish and a rich diversity of beneficial life forms.
Areas like the Gulf of Mexico could be transformed. While no Ocean Restorer can directly treat crude oil pouring out of a well into the sea, dilute levels of contamination with oil-based chemicals can be treated. A fleet of somewhere between one hundred and one thousand Ocean Restorers plying the Gulf of Mexico could return the waters to their former health and mitigate the annual onslaught of agricultural and industrial chemicals that flow into it from the Mississippi River. Our dream is to create a culture of ocean stewardship that assists the seas in restoring the great oceanic bounty with which they used to bless us.
