ARGONETA is an idea stage company developing shallow water, open ocean, underwater habitats for use by citizen scientists. Argoneta’s platform provides significant cost, safety and usability advantages over other undersea habitats.

Their hypothesis is by leveraging the benefits of underwater living/saturation diving in a safe and cost effective manner, that they can:

(1) Accelerate coral outplanting for programs like NOAA Mission: Iconic Reefs

(2) Accelerate the impact that citizen scientists can have in the marine environments due to saturation diving/underwater habitat based scuba diving bottom times that are 3 - 5X longer than diving from the surface

Their long term vision is to combine an “underwater AirBNB” concept with a “SpaceX/Blue Origin/Virgin Galactic” like experience for the ocean targeting an expanded market of recreational divers and non-divers.

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Ivan Francis received the $500 Coastal Idea Challenge award in Spring 2024.

As an out-of-state transfer student, Elizabeth faced a challenging start at North Carolina State University when she tested positive for COVID-19 and had to self-isolate for 10 days. This isolation delayed her ability to integrate into the campus community and marked the beginning of an almost two-year struggle to rediscover the personal drive she had in high school.

It wasn’t until she attended the Blue Economy Workshop in Morehead City, NC, in March 2023 that things changed, and she developed an interest in entrepreneurship and marine renewable energy.

The Blue Economy workshops in 2023 and 2024 provided her with valuable networking opportunities, helped her learn new potential interests, and clarified the steps she needs to take moving forward with her own innovations. As a senior, she joined the Interdisciplinary Innovation in the Blue Economy class offered at NC State with biogeochemist Chris Osburn.

This class focused on brainstorming innovative solutions to the problems we face along our coasts, with an entrepreneurial approach to the sustainable use of ocean resources to promote economic growth. At the end of the semester, she gave a pitch for Albatross Aerobotics to reimagine offshore wind.

As we see a push for renewable energy, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an untapped potential. Maintenance personnel and infrastructure success face significant risks in offshore wind farm operations. As the development of offshore wind turbines becomes more prevalent, increased vessel activity is significantly harmful to marine life.

The mission of Albatross Aerobotics is to rethink offshore wind farm inspection and maintenance, providing monitoring services at sea while ensuring safe, remote access from land. This would decrease vessel activity on the water.

This innovation utilizes UAVs equipped with the tools to provide inspection and maintenance services to turbines. Albatross Aerobotics is a new approach focused on safety and environmental sustainability, reducing risks to maintenance personnel and to the environment by minimizing traditional maintenance and the need for vessel traffic.

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Libby Ivory is a 2024 graduate of NC State University and a participant in the Blue Economy Innovation Program. She received the $500 Coastal Idea Challenge award in Spring 2024.

Nautigen is a blue biotechnology startup focusing on sustainable bioprospecting and biodiversity exploration of the rare microbial biosphere in extreme marine ecosystems.

The R&D project will develop innovative tools and utilize cost-efficient techniques to rapidly detect, map, and catalog the marine microbiome found within deep, complex benthic marine environments.

Using non-invasive state of the art and emerging molecular and remote sensing technologies, biodiversity of marine extremophiles and the biotechnological potential of novel bioactive molecules is evaluated in real time and in situ for transparent drug discovery pipelines and sustainable pharmaceutical applications within the Blue Economy.

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Garrett Mitchell is a senior geoscientist at Fugro specializing in deepwater geochemical exploration and remote sensing for hydrocarbon seeps and marine habitat characterization. His research focuses on using advanced remote sensing technologies for environmental monitoring and biodiversity assessments, with a strong background in multibeam backscatter acoustic data.

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Garrett received the $500 Coastal Idea Challenge award in Spring 2024.