Two coastal Alabama residents are hoping to combat climate change with a new invention that makes it easier to grow oysters.
Andy DePaola, a retired microbiologist from the Food and Drug Administration, and Ben Raines, a former AL.com reporter and current environmental fellow at the University of South Alabama, lead the Restoring Oysters for Climate Resilience, or ROCS, project.
The group hopes to use Depaola’s patented invention, the Shellevator, as a way to increase oyster production both locally and globally, which they say can both feed the world and remove carbon from the short-term carbon footprint. cycle, the process by which carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.
“Oysters are the oldest carbon sink [something that absorbs and stores carbon] in the world,” Raines says.
The Shellevator is an oyster farming device that removes oysters from the water using an air pump in minutes, dramatically reducing the labor required. The sheller is mobile, meaning it can be moved as needed and can be scaled up or down to increase the number of oysters produced, Depaola says.
The Express Sheller model can hold 96 bags of oysters, each bag containing between 300-500 oysters. With the shell machine, one person can grow millions of oysters a year, according to a video Raines created.
“The importance of this cannot be overstated,” DePaola said. “I can grow about 20 times more crops per acre than I can with conventional [manual] methods.”
In April, the nonprofit was named one of the top 50 teams in the Decarbonize XPRIZE, a quadrennial competition organized by Elon Musk to incentivize carbon capture projects. The winner of the competition will receive $50 million, which will be awarded in 2025. In September, Raines and DePaola will travel to California to meet with investors as part of XPRIZE.
The team has also applied for state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA) funds to implement the local shelevator. Reigns says they are still waiting to hear if they received the funds.
More than oysters
Raines and DePaola hope to recreate the oyster reefs that have been lost not only in Mobile Bay, but around the world as oyster hunting has decimated reefs in recent decades. According to a previous report by Raines at AL.com, 1.8 billion adult oysters are likely to have been removed from Mobile Bay over the past century. In 2010, 142,359 pounds of oysters were harvested from the bay, compared to 33,586 pounds in 2015.
Oysters extract carbon from the water to form their shells, which are made of calcium carbonate. On a three-acre site on the Mississippi River off the coast of Alabama, 300 selevators can remove 1,000 tons of carbon from the short-term carbon cycle in seven months, according to a video Raines created. To enter Musk’s contest, entrants had to show that their invention could remove 1,000 metric tons of carbon per year.
And replenishing the world’s oysters would improve water quality, they argue. Oysters are what’s known as a “keystone species,” meaning they have a disproportionate effect on the ecosystem. According to the Connecticut Department of Agriculture, oysters create new habitats for marine life by forming reefs, and they (like other clams) filter water and remove particles and nutrients during the feeding process.
At DePaola’s farm on Portersville Bay in Codon, flounder, dolphins and other marine life gathered around the shell elevators, attracted by the ecosystem created by the oysters.
Creating a Shellevator
When he first invented the Shellevator, DePaola was simply looking for an easier way to access the oysters he grew under his pier in Mobile Bay. Farmed oysters must be raised out of the water once a week to kill pests and control biofouling, a process known as desiccation. A native of North Carolina, DePaola has always loved eating oysters and began growing them in 2013.
After Depaola, 71, was injured in an accident and broke his neck, his wife began caring for his oysters. Even though he regained his mobility, DePaola still wanted a way to access the oysters without manually lifting bags out of the water.
He approached Reigns about the idea. Eventually, they realized that the Shellevator could be much more than an aquaculture tool.
Feeding the world
Beyond the environmental impact, Raines and DePaola say the Shellevator could help feed the world’s population. Not only will bringing back oyster harvesting create jobs, the Shellevator allows oysters to be mass-produced, reducing labor and making oysters cheaper.
“You can give people a technology where you create a protein,” says Raines. “We think we can revolutionize oyster production around the world.”
next steps
Right now, the two are looking for a way to make the shelevators cheaper to manufacture. The “express” huller, made using a repurposed pontoon boat and cages welded in Louisiana, costs between $10,000 and $20,000 to build, DePaola says.
And Depaola has another idea to recreate wild oyster reefs in the bay. Dubbed “The Reefer,” Depaola dips coiled crab trap wire into a tank full of eyed oyster larvae, which will attach to the wire and begin to grow. The larvae will then grow in a shell former until they are one inch in size, at which point the wire can be deployed in the water, creating a new oyster reef.
Ultimately, Raines says, the two want to recreate the Mobile Bay oyster reefs they remember from childhood. You used to be able to harvest oysters for most of the year, but now the season is reduced to just a few weeks.
“Carbon capture is just a total bonus,” Raines says.
