Written by Jamie Wedderburn, CTO of Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering
Humans are amazing. A unique combination of our big brains and dexterous hands means that we can dream up solutions to any problem, and then build whatever mad contraption we’ve come up with. Bit by bit, we’ve solved major causes of death for humans: disease, malnutrition, and infection.
Due to human innovation, modern-day men and women can live a life more abundant than even the richest emperors of antiquity. However, like with every innovation, these great improvements in life have come with downsides. Humanity has flourished immensely but nature has suffered.
In today's media landscape, discussions about climate change often present two contrasting narratives: one emphasises the necessity of significant lifestyle cutbacks to combat the crisis, while the other denies the existence of climate change altogether. I'd like to offer an alternative.
Reduce emissions where it works for you and your community, then collectively, we use technological innovation to remove or reduce the remaining emissions.
One such option, prime for innovation, is “blue carbon”. Blue carbon is the concept of using biological processes within our waterways or oceans to absorb and store carbon from our atmosphere.
The oceans absorb around 30% of the CO2 that we, as a species, emit.
While significant efforts have been made to innovate CO2 drawdown directly from our atmosphere, such as through various direct air capture methods, there has been comparatively little investment in attempting to do this from our oceans.
I co-founded Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering to address this very problem. We are building autonomous robots that can restore our ocean ecosystems on a scale never seen before. Our mission is to have a suite of robots that can restore ocean ecosystems in order to draw down our CO2 emissions and maintain the health of our oceans, from oyster reefs to kelp forests.
Currently, our focus is on seagrass. Seagrass is an amazing plant. It's the nursery habitat for many of the world’s most important commercial fish and removes nitrogen from the ocean, reducing the impact of agricultural runoff and keeping our coastal areas free of harmful algae blooms. It can even reduce wave energy by up to 50%, limiting the impact of storm surges.
Perhaps most importantly, due to the anoxic sediments underneath the grass, it can absorb and lock away carbon from the atmosphere for millennia, at a rate far higher than that of any terrestrial forest.
Whilst seagrass is a superstar carbon-storing ecosystem, there’s a problem. Globally we lose around 7% of our seagrass every year. This equates to roughly 10,000km2 annually, and whilst existing restoration efforts are a noble and important undertaking, they barely scratch the surface, with typical restoration plots being in the hectare scale - 1/100 km2.
Seagrass, as a cornerstone ecosystem, was the perfect starting point for our journey, given its remarkable benefits. To save our oceans, we must save the grass! Nearly a year into our restoration journey, it's been a fast-paced exhilarating ride. I’d like to share this adventure with you so you might gain a sense of how to pick up the gauntlet yourself and what you can expect from doing so.
In the beginning
In early 2023 I was working in the space industry designing satellites. It had been my dream to enter this sector and, for all intents and purposes, the job was great. The work was fascinating and the culture and team were amazing. However, I found myself lacking purpose because I was fulfilling a mission that wasn't my own. I realised that I couldn't see myself doing this for the next 40 years, so I decided to start my own company. I started hunting out problems that needed to be solved but nothing seemed right, the most obvious business ideas were all fulfilling some vapid consumer need like faster takeaway delivery or some new way of storing your toiletries (which I actually made a concept for but no one wanted to buy it!).
Then towards the end of March 2023, this all changed. I was out walking with some friends and as usual, we started to discuss our current pursuits.
My friend started to tell me about a seagrass project she had been volunteering at. The plant sounded amazing, a super plant, but it was dying.
The manual restoration sounded hard, laborious and small-scale. Naturally, as an engineer and ardent nerd, I started to quiz her on the use of robotics in restoring the plant as it sounded like a prime target for automation. Oddly there didn't seem to be anything being used. Enter my eureka moment.
When I got home that evening I ended up in a four-hour YouTube hole researching the restoration methods as well as digging deeper into the benefits of the species. I was so energised with the potential for this idea that I immediately reached out to an old colleague, friend and brilliant engineer, Akhil, to float the idea and ask him to join me. It was a resounding yes, and he got to work building us a team. So that's how, in early May 2023, I found myself in Dublin with a wonderful little robot hacked together with 3D-printed parts and electronics bought online, ready to meet the team and test our contraption in the turbid waters of Dublin Bay.
Here, I met the two individuals who would complete our company. Colm was working as an aerodynamicist in Redbull F1, and had a litany of engineering awards to his name. Will had worked as the go-to market strategist as the first hire in an E-scooter startup. They are both esteemed in their fields and perfectly rounded out the team with each of us bringing different expertise to the table. We clicked like old friends.
Whilst Colm and I were working on the robot architecture and design, Akhil and Will had been beavering away trying to get some traction with Venture Capital firms, and so, in September we found ourselves in San Francisco. We arrived off the plane with three pitches booked in, but we found that for every good pitch we presented, we would be introduced to another two or three firms. People wanted to help and we quickly found ourselves with around three pitches a day. By week two we had a lead investor. The rest of our funding round quickly filled up, eventually becoming oversubscribed, meaning that there were more offers than we could accommodate. The money started trickling through by November, so we now had the funds to bring our much-discussed contraptions to life!
One small step
Whilst we were waiting for the money to hit the bank, Will had been reaching out to research institutes studying seagrass to provide us with the biology know-how and to partner with us on our first restoration efforts. Just by coincidence, Professor Gary Kendrick at the University of Western Australia had been looking for someone like us to scale up their restoration efforts.
By late November, Colm and Akhil headed to Australia with our first piece of hardware, developed in just a week, to test the underlying concept that we planned to automate: seed injection. We later discovered that many of the researchers in the institute didn't believe we’d turn up, but we did, and more importantly, the method worked.
The injection method had a 90% seed survival rate and what's more, research showed that injected seeds yielded a significant increase in total biomass when compared to traditional methods. Our idea was validated!
Following the success of the trip, we got to work. We had to devise a way to take a large amount of seeds, single them out, and then inject them into the seabed without damaging them. This proved to be quite the challenge. Over the next five months, we developed the product and by March 2024 we were ready to head back and test the robot in the field.
We arrived back in Australia bleary-eyed, jet-lagged, and grumpy. However, the next day we headed to the University of Western Australia campus to test our system with real seeds instead of the 3D-printed replica seeds we’d been using thus far. Straight off the bat, our robotic system annihilated the seeds, we’d clearly missed something when converting the manual injecting tool into a machine. So, over the next week, we hacked the prototype to make it work. Fortunately we’d brought about half our workshop over with us so we weren’t lacking for tools. It was all worth it; by the end of the two weeks we had confirmed the functionality of our core concepts and we returned to Ireland with all the data we needed to make our robot perfect.
Next steps
In about a year we’ve gone from a nebulous idea to a funded company with revenue and a scalable robot that can restore kilometres of benthic habitat every year. But it doesn't end here. Whilst we are yet to break ground on our first commercial project, we’ve laid the groundwork for it. With a bit more luck and hard work, come November 2024, we’ll have kicked off a revolution in the restoration industry, paving the way for more sustainable coastal regions.
What comes after that? We want to reverse ecosystem loss across the board. We won't be happy until our autonomous robots aid not only seagrass, but also kelp, oysters, coral and any other threatened ecosystems. What's more, through applying these principles across all aquatic ecosystems I believe we can significantly boost our planet's capability to absorb CO2 and abate global warming.
So, to close this article, I have one request:
In a world where voices that shout the loudest rise to the top, use yours to find real-world solutions, and don't just talk about it. Go out and build, go out and fix our planet.
If you have any questions or want to bounce some ideas off me, then you’re more than welcome to. If restoration at scale is something you’re interested in and you think you have the right skills for it, fire me over a CV as we’re always looking for the best talent. Good luck, and happy planting.
Author Email: jamie@ulysses.eco
What a great article, journey and solution.