Dr. Stefan Kraan, Chief Scientific Officer of Seaweed Company, Ltd. presented seaweed cultivation as regenerative adjunct to offshore energy production.
He explained the benefits for offshore energy producers and local communities. This technology has been used in reducing the impacts of ocean acidification near offshore energy infrastructure.
Steffan Kraan is a science-driven entrepeneur. Born in The Netherlands he graduated with an M.Sc. degree in Marine Biology from the National University of Groningen, Netherlands. He moved to Ireland to pursue a Ph.D. in phylogenetics and aquaculture of edible seaweeds at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1998. He became manager of the Irish Seaweed Industry Organisation in 1998 and finished his Ph.D. in 2001.
He established the Irish Seaweed Centre in 2001, a dedicated R&D center for seaweed-based research and development, which was launched in 2001. After managing the seaweed center for 9 years, Dr. Kraan resigned from University life in 2009 to pursue and develop some commercial ideas using seaweeds for a variety of purposes amongst them functional food ingredients for fish farming and novel algae cultivation systems for biofuel production.
Dr. Kraan co-founded Ocean Harvest Technology Ltd, a company that has produced Oceanfeed™, a seaweed-based functional feed ingredient for the fish farming industry and other aquaculture industries. He is currently CSO of The Seaweed Company, a company that develops large-scale seaweed cultivation to produce biomass for a variety of applications. Dr. Kraan’s main fields of expertise are aquaculture of seaweeds, sustainable development of algal resources, industrial applications of seaweeds, and usage of seaweeds in aquaculture, biotechnology, and biomedicine.