Good Science, No Contract

Week 29 | June 2026

Marine-derived biomaterials don’t appear to have made it into defence procurement conversations yet. Not seriously anyway. The science works, the farming is possible, but the economics have been the reason every time. Without a credible cost-of-production number, no Scope 3 review reaches this category, no SBTi-driven supply chain audit flags it, and no prime's sustainability team has anything to take to a materials procurement officer. 

That changed in October last year - quietly, in a journal most defence procurement teams are unlikely to be reading.

A peer-reviewed paper landed in Algal Research from a team at the University of Maine's Darling Marine Center, led by Professor Damian Brady, working with ocean engineering firm Kelson Marine Co. The lead author was Zach Moscicki. The question: can you actually produce farmed kelp at a price that makes commercial sense? The answer? Yes, with the right farm design and operational discipline.

The team modelled a 405-hectare sugar kelp farm sited 20 kilometres offshore in the Gulf of Maine. The baseline cost of production using typical approaches was USD $2,618 per fresh tonne. But, stack the optimisations: deeper cultivation lines, mechanised harvest and seeding, on-site slurry processing and purpose-matched vessels and that number falls to $383 per fresh tonne. An 85% reduction. At the same site.

Toby Dewhurst, Kelson Marine's CEO and one of the paper's authors, put the sector's decade-long problem plainly in a recent LinkedIn post: the refrain wasn't "there's no market." It was "there's no market at prices that cover the cost of production." The Kelson/UMaine tool is the first rigorous engineering framework to find out what those prices actually are and, critically, what drives them.

This is real supply-side movement that’s peer-reviewed and grounded in physics and operational data.

The demand side is a different story. And that's the part worth paying attention to.

Dewhurst has been working with seaweed farmers since 2017. He’s made his observations clear: a tone shift "maybe 2023," bankruptcies and suspended operations mounting, and a sector repeating "there's no market." His correction: the fuller picture was "there's no market at prices that cover cost of production." 

The diagnosis, which the UMaine TEA paper now supports quantitatively, is that the sector was seduced by cost estimates with no grounding in operational reality. COP projections varied by orders of magnitude. The physics wasn't in the room.

GreenWave's State of the Kelp Industry report (February 2026) puts hard numbers on the correction: only 27% of farms surveyed reported profitability in 2025. Bren Smith, GreenWave's co-founder, was direct about why: the pre-2023 wave "treated kelp like a technology problem instead of an agricultural system." Bad assumptions. Bad bets. A sector now working through the consequences.

The Kelson/UMaine TEA paper is what fixing the agricultural system looks like. There’s one caveat worth stating plainly: the $383 figure is a modelled optimum for one theoretical Gulf of Maine site, not an achieved farm-gate price. The value is the method, not the number. The method matters because previous methods were wrong.

Why does any of this matter?

This publication has established the problem in its structural form: marine biomaterials have promising science and no supply chain ready for defence procurement. The supply-side picture has moved. The Kelson/UMaine TEA paper is the economics signal, the first rigorous evidence that the cost-of-production barrier can be broken. It suggests a supply side maturing, slowly, toward something a procurement conversation could actually start with.

The demand side is a different story.

Defence primes with SBTi commitments face Scope 3 supply chain pressure that, in theory, creates pull for lower-carbon materials including marine-derived alternatives. Seaweed-derived composites, alginate-based coatings, bio-based logistics packaging: all theoretically in scope.

Theoretically.

The SBTi picture across major defence primes the picture bifurcates sharply along geographic lines.

Saab validated SBTi targets in 2022, the first major defence company to do so. Thales followed in 2023. BAE Systems and Leonardo both achieved validation in 2024. BAE's targets, published December 2024, cover Scope 1, 2, and 3 through to 2050. Leonardo's were approved by SBTi in April 2024 across its entire value chain. 

Then there is the US.

Lockheed Martin has no validated SBTi targets. A shareholder proposal at the 2024 AGM, noting that the company's operational targets cover only 2% of total emissions with no disclosed plan for the remaining 98%, received 32.2% support. RTX (Raytheon) has no validated full-value-chain targets. Huntington Ingalls Industries has no SBTi commitment; a 2024 shareholder resolution for science-based targets received roughly 28% support. Northrop Grumman: absent from the SBTi dashboard entirely, with self-set operations-only targets. General Dynamics and L3Harris: same picture.

The Scope 3 cascade pressure that might eventually pull bio-based materials into defence supply chains exists in Europe. It does not, as yet and in any meaningful sense, exist in the US prime industrial base.

The assumption that regulatory pressure will eventually force the issue needs updating.

The FAR climate disclosure rule, which would have required major contractors to set SBTi-validated targets, was withdrawn 13 January 2025. The SEC climate rule was abandoned the same year. In May this year, a new DFARS rule actively prohibited DoD contracting officers from requiring non-traditional contractors to disclose greenhouse gas emissions as a condition of award. The US regulatory direction, for defence procurement specifically, is running against the mechanism that was supposed to close the gap.

The counter-current is worth noting. The FY2026 NDAA Section 248, signed December 2025, directs the Pentagon to develop biobased product merit guidance and review military specifications to accommodate biobased products. A DoD biotechnology roadmap is expected September 2026. Two concurrent policy moves, opposite directions. Neither names marine biomaterials. But Section 248, once implemented, is the closest thing the US procurement system has to a door ajar.

At alliance level, NATO's Biotechnology and Human Enhancement Strategy (April 2024) names bio-based materials as a strategic objective. AUKUS Pillar 2 has no bio-materials workstream. Australia's sustainable procurement policy covers construction, ICT, textiles, and furniture. Not marine biomaterials.

OTI's thesis on marine biomaterials has always been structural: the science is real, the farming is possible, but the valley between supply-side readiness and defence procurement readiness is wider than the coverage suggests. The Kelson/UMaine paper and the GreenWave data together suggest the supply side is finally moving toward something honest. Not optimistic, not speculative, but grounded. An 85% modelled cost reduction at a single Gulf of Maine site is not a commercial breakthrough. It is a proof of method. The method matters because the previous methods were wrong.

The demand-side pathway remains the binding constraint. Not because defence companies don't have sustainability commitments. Several do. But because those commitments are geographically concentrated, the cascade to supply chain materials is slow, and the regulatory mechanisms that would have accelerated that cascade have been pulled in the US context specifically.

If seaweed-derived materials enter defence supply chains in the next three to five years, the most likely route is through European primes operating under EU CSRD circular-economy disclosure requirements. Not through a US procurement mandate that currently does not exist.

The watch items are specific. Publication of the DoD biobased merit guidance under FY2026 NDAA Section 248. Any EU prime naming marine or bio-based materials in an ESRS E5 circular-design target. A Western seaweed farm achieving sustained commercial production anywhere near the $383 per tonne pathway the Kelson team has modelled. And any defence prime disclosing actual bio-based material procurement spend above zero.

None of those have happened yet. All of them would change the brief.

The GAO told Congress the US Navy has leadership and organisational gaps in integrating autonomous systems. What the coverage missed is the more interesting read: if the world's best-resourced navy can't absorb autonomous capability fast enough, the institutional gap isn't a funding problem. It's a doctrine problem. And it has implications well beyond the Pentagon.

Since you have been, thanks for reading. 

Cheers, 

Mick

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