SPEAKER
Lourdes Gant, Steve Meller
Lourdes Gant 00:05
As a business owner of an aquaculture company, how can you take the first step to be profitable and sustainable at the same time? That’s what we’re going to be talking about in these episodes. Hello, and welcome to the Business of Aquaculture Podcast. This is the podcast for the Sustainable Business movement in the Aquafarming and Oceanranching industries. This podcast aims to amplify the voices of entrepreneurs addressing the United Nations Global Goals, a.k.a. Sustainable Development Goals #14: to conserve and sustainably use the oceans and the seas. Listen to fellow business aquaculturists in their journey in this new model of food production of making their business sustainable and help the oceans’ ecology – while also making a profit, all at the same time. Get inspired to learn how even small- to medium-businesses can make an impact to save the seas, leave a legacy, and have a better quality of life. One of our goals is to take away a nugget of wisdom that will help your business move from the Industrial Revolution to Business 5.0. Our vision is that of collaboration in the aquaculture industry. I’m Lourdes Gant, your host.
Lourdes Gant 01:25
As an aquaculture business, how do you discuss climate change in the aquaculture industry, specifically reducing methane emissions to zero? This episode is dedicated to answering that question. So listen in, and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode, I’m grateful to have Steve Meller for the second time, who is the CEO of CH4 Global Inc. Welcome again, Steve.
Steve Meller 01:50
Good morning, Lourdes. How are you? Glad to be back.
Lourdes Gant 01:53
Yes, I’m so happy that you’re back. He is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, innovator, founder and board advisor after a successful career in corporate and academia. CH4’s mission is to meaningfully impact climate change at scale today by harnessing the power of Asparagopsis seaweed to reduce methane from cows and making it easy for farmers to adapt. I’m so happy you’re back in the show, Steve.
Steve Meller 02:20
Yes, excited to talk. It’s been a little while and a lot’s happened with us. So happy to find ways to share what those updates are.
Lourdes Gant 02:28
That’ll be great. So why don’t we get started with- I shared the mission at the intro when I introduced you, maybe: what’s the next vision for CH4?
Steve Meller 02:38
Well, the next vision – we’ve been really working very hard in the last few months to determine our ability to bring first commercial product to market, and that’s imminent for us. It will be in Australia – which is one of the bases of our operations, so we’ll be making some announcements here in the coming short while about what that looks like. But first, commercial market entry is an incredibly important milestone in any company’s growth. And we’ve also been working very closely with a number of large global corporates, and sometime during the summer, we should announce some of those partnerships – which will, I think, help validate and demonstrate the ability to be able to scale the impact of this product. It meets our company mission: our first and foremost and top of mind mission for us is to impact climate change at scale with urgency. It’s incredibly important to us to align to that mission, and it remains our goal.
Lourdes Gant 03:44
That’s really exciting. We are having our first crop of harvest after 10 years, ourselves – so I know how it feels that feels like being able to do what we are supposed to do from long time ago. So, that’s exciting. Also, the partnerships that you mentioned. And so, in my head, what popped up was 2P: product entry and partnerships. So maybe one of the other things that I wanted to ask you last year – I was interviewing people about future trends in the aquaculture industry – what do you see as a future trend? Maybe next three years, even five years from now?
Steve Meller 04:20
Well, I think broadly in aquaculture, the ability, or I should say, the recognition, I think, more importantly, in the last few years – or perhaps two areas. We don’t have enough protein on the planet to feed the people we have today. And in a world of 2040, when we’ll have, perhaps even 9.5 billion – according to the United Nations – we are massively short on protein. And that includes all the best projections around plant-based proteins, even insects as a protein source, homegrown, lab grown protein – so it’s not like: hey, let’s just grow more of that. They are already aggressively built into those assumptions, and yet, we’re still massively short. That’s an incredibly important piece and the recognition that the ocean has a wide area that we’ve generally not cultivated, so to speak – certainly not like we have on land – we just need to be careful that we don’t overdo it and destroy the environment that it’s in. You know, people are finding microplastics in the animal feed chain now; in fact, they saw a report that microplastics, for the first time ever, have shown up in human blood – from sources of eating from the ocean for which is in there – so we have to be really careful at managing that ecosystem. But it’s a source for fish, or shellfish or seaweed – and seaweed is that second big trend, I think: there’s a growing recognition that the rate of growth, the quality of certainly some of the reds, and greens, and brown seaweeds can impart, both from a therapeutic, organic standpoint, and from a feedstuff standpoint – some of those seaweeds are very high in protein content. So finding the right ways to grow, harvest and process them into the foods we have just gives the world the ability to at least try to close those gaps up.
Lourdes Gant 06:22
Well, thank you for sharing that. I love that you were able to share these two areas: mentioning enough – not enough, I guess – even though people are talking about how we’re going to feed the 9 billion people in 2030 – 2050. So you mentioned about the reds, greens, and browns for seaweed, which is a trend that we know has been in the pipeline. Would you like to share this first commercial project in terms of your seaweed? What is it like?
Steve Meller 06:48
Well, we have a red seaweed that we are aquaculturing both in the ocean and in land-based systems: there are relative merits of doing it in both. And this particular red seaweed appears, at least, to be unique at the moment. I’m sure there are others out there that we haven’t uncovered. There’s something like 10,000 species of seaweeds on the planet. And, you know, maybe 500 have been looked at so far, trying to look for another one that does this type of benefit. What we know what’s been uncovered – not by us, but by research that we’re able to leverage – is that this particular species of red seaweed – Asparagopsis is the name, and there’s a cold water and a warm water version, but they’re quite similar in many respects – when you are able to provide a very small amount, less than one half of 1% of the total daily diet – think of it like a sprinkling on top of a meal – of processed seaweed – I’ll come back to that – you have an incredibly profound effect on methane. You can almost eliminate methane production from those cattle. You get a second benefit Lourdes, though: you get an increase in the efficiency of those animals. You can get more beef, and/or potentially – although not yet studied on that side – more milk on those same cows: that helps close that protein gap as well. But from the seaweed standpoint, all of the actions that are there come from a known series of halogenated, or metabolic processing within the seaweed – all seaweeds produce these materials. This particular species of red seaweed appears to be unique that it stores and concentrates them in the plant. And it does so because of a defense mechanism. So, it’s a beautiful looking red Christmas tree that likes to wave around in the water with light glistening on it. So, it becomes quite attractive for other marine species to come up and nibble on it. They nibble on and they say: I don’t like that, too much concentrated stuff I don’t like – they go away. So it’s been over eons its defense mechanism that it’s developed. And as I said, I’m sure other species have done that – we just haven’t uncovered them yet. And we, you know, the people on the planet who are looking for them. But this particular one, if you can preserve the integrity of those little vesicles in the seaweed through the processing, and you know how to maximize the growth of them, you can then have a product at the end of the day that has this highly effective result in cattle. And that’s really what we’ve been doing for the last three years: is trying to understand each of the steps and get them to a way where we can build an end to end process that’s consistent, resulting in the ability to have commercial introduction of products.
Lourdes Gant 09:44
That’s really exciting. Interestingly – yesterday, actually – Reuters just published an article saying that the cows are the new coal because methane emissions from agriculture should no longer be an afterthought.
Steve Meller 09:58
Agreed.
Lourdes Gant 09:58
So this is what you’re talking about.
Steve Meller 10:01
Yep.
Lourdes Gant 10:02
And so maybe you can expand more on that. How does iceberg opsis actually help reduce methane.
Steve Meller 10:08
So there’s nothing magic about it. It’s really an understanding or an appreciation now of the cows’ physiology. So cows, unlike us – ruminants: cattle, sheep, goats, camels, deer, and other four-stomached species all do the same thing – cattle just happened to be the largest impact on methane production, not only amongst those species, or amongst any sources of anthropogenic methane; more than is produced by the oil and gas industry. It is the single biggest source of methane on the planet, more than the entire annual emissions of the country of China. So not only is it a large problem, as you describe, but it’s actually a large opportunity if you can find ways to deal with that – which is where we come in. So, when cattle eat grasses and grains – which is their primary foodstuff; we can’t eat them, or we can eat them, but we can’t digest them – they have series of methanogenic bacteria, different species and strains that are there to facilitate the breakdown of that into little energy units. And for a cow, that’s fatty acids. And there’s a lot of complex biochemistry that happens, but very simply put, as it breaks them down, those bacteria use some of the energy the cow has ingested – about 15% of that energy – to cause that breakdown, and then produce methane as a result: it produces methane from some of those energy sources. So it converts some of those energy sources into that – in a general sense, what happens. And so if you blocked the production of methane, not only do you block methane going out, you keep those energy sources inside the cow. And it blocks it – it’s not magic, it’s an enzymatic blockade, it’s a blockade of an enzyme that normally produces methane in here. So, it’s all well known physiology associated with it.
Lourdes Gant 12:14
I love that it almost really sound organic. It’s like this.
Steve Meller 12:17
Yes, it is.
Lourdes Gant 12:18
It is what it is. And so my last question is, what’s one thing you can advise, as a leader in this industry, I love that you were part of the COP26 that just happened a while back there. So maybe you can give us some of the learnings that you had from that event.
Steve Meller 12:36
I’m sort of chuckling because I’m a bit of a critic of what happens at events like that. And I think that we’ve been saying – and I meant we the scientific community, and as a card carrying PhD person, I still feel I’m part of that – has been saying for decades now: decades and decades that impact through production of carbon dioxide, primarily from fossil fuels and methane – which has become much more of interest, certainly in the last 12 months – are contributing to, you know, the changes in climate change that we’re seeing now. And it’s only going to get worse and more destructive on the planet. And I don’t need to go through all of that, because it’s already well documented, well known. I think what’s important here, Lourdes, and what I see is a lack of recognition that we can’t just stop production of fossil fuels tomorrow. It isn’t possible. In fact, the war in Ukraine is a perfect example of why that’s just not feasible. You can’t just stop producing cattle, as the vegan movement would love to have happen. There are a major source of protein: 35 to 40% of the protein sources on the planet today. We’re already short, you can’t. So all of these things that are ultimately good for the planet: on reducing fossil fuel usage, on reducing the numbers of cattle, because they require large amounts of grazing land – are all important, but there’s a transition through them. So how do we recognize that, talk about it that way, and manage the transition? And doing things like we’re doing help facilitate that transmission. We cannot, today – I believe – decarbonize, through reductions in fossil fuel, or improvements in efficiency, to get the world to 45 to 50% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030: which is the stated goals of the United Nations, the EU, IPCC. It’s not possible to do that. Not only from a technical standpoint about what it would take to build the infrastructure – you can’t just go put up a few more solar cells, the scale of what’s required is monumental. And so I think my point is recognition of the tasks ahead, in a detailed way is lacking; because then it helps prevent building the right plan of what you should do where. The big problem and all of this is getting the world’s nations to cooperate and collaborate. We can’t do that on anything, let alone on something of major importance. And again, history would show us that’s the case for since 1959, when the world started measuring CO2 concentrations in parts per million in the atmosphere. And if you look at the graphs that are already out or the most of the popular web press, 1959 – 2021: on an annual basis, that is pretty well a 45 degree straight line – there’s no deviation. So all of the introductions of the IPCC’s reports, all of the growing body of evidence about the impact of climate change, haven’t deviated that curve one fraction, It’s the ability, one, to recognize you have a problem; and then find a strategy global to deal with it. I think we’re still struggling, as a species, to recognize that we have a problem.
Lourdes Gant 16:14
Wow, that’s staggering numbers, and in terms of the gravity of what the challenge is now. But I love what you mentioned in terms of just recognizing the tasks ahead and managing that transition. What came to my mind when you were talking about statistics was: we can just do 1%, every day, we’ll be way ahead, because I think what ended up happening is we have these big events talking about these big challenges, and then it just becomes stuck. And we forgot to actually walk after it.
Steve Meller 16:46
We found out during COVID, there was a reduction: that was a dip in that curve, post COVID. When one measured it. But we know what the world went through: there was a dramatic reduction in transportation and movements and air travel and production of – so we know that. And it was reflected in a reduction. But the following year, it rebounded back to higher than it was. And really, our society is centered on growth: everything has to be showing growth and development of it. And so we as individuals, and as a community; all of the people on the planet have to play a part. Now, what’s true is as it’s described, the Global North – which is mostly the developed world countries – produce most of the impact. But most of the impact today is felt by the Global South, you know, the developing countries – and that’s just not appropriate. And so, finding the right ways to appreciate how we moved from where we are, to somewhere else in the next 10 years, I think is really the challenge. It’s not about stopping oil, or stopping cows, or making them more efficient. They’re individual tactics that allow you to transition. But it’s really a broader societal question about how we get to a different place, to live in harmony on the planet that we have.
Lourdes Gant 18:18
Well, I guess that’s the magic word: it’s harmony. So, my biggest takeaway from our conversation today is when you were talking about partnerships to scale, which also is in conjunction, when you are talking about we have to be careful how to take care of this ocean ecosystem that we build this industry on. So thank you again, Steve, how do they get in touch with you?
Steve Meller 18:41
I think through our website – we have a Contact Us button in there. We’re retooling the website, but that should still be a prominent piece that will go in. And everything that comes in there, we will answer and address. So those that need to get to me will come to me, those that need to get to someone about communications will end up with Rowena Pullan; technical ones – they’ll go to the right places. We’re small enough now, we can manage it in that way. But absolutely, so- we won’t ignore things that come in.
Lourdes Gant 19:13
Sounds good. Dear subscribers, do leave a review of the podcast so we can get more people to be aware of the value our guests are providing in these conversations. If you’re new to the podcast, I’d like to hear from you. Thanks, everyone. Thanks again, Steve.
Steve Meller 19:26
Thank you, Lourdes.
Lourdes Gant 19:31
Thank you for listening and I hope you are inspired from this episode. Do take a moment and share this with your friends and colleagues and rate and review the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I’d love to know what your biggest takeaway from this conversation has been – what are you going to do differently? Please share your thoughts across social media and tag us. For links and show notes for this episode, visit our website: www.sustainableaquaculture.ca/podcast . So, thank you again – I hope you will join me on the next episode, and together, we can help create a better business in aquaculture.
