Projects

Aquaculture is often put forward as a solution to meet the growing demand for healthy products from the sea. But is large-scale aquaculture feasible in the Belgian part of the North Sea? The MARCOS project explores three possible scenarios in this regard in detail.

This project will develop a toolbox for the assessment and integration of social and spatial risks of multifunctional marine infrastructure. This toolbox can be deployed during a co-creation process and includes a generic set of building blocks and their degrees of freedom. It integrates hard and soft functionality in a quantitative and objective manner in order to maximise the success rate of complex marine infrastructure projects.

Inn2POWER aims to support SMEs in the North Sea area in setting up innovative partnerships in the maintenance and monitoring of offshore wind farms. Through Inn2POWER, Flemish suppliers will have easier access to a stronger framework for international cooperation in the North Sea area and to international testing facilities.

The Coastbusters project aims to test the capacity and added value of certain biogenic organisms (plants, bivalves, tubeworms) for coastal defence. The necessary reinforcement of the coast will also mean a natural reinforcement and improve biodiversity.

Although desalination technology has already been globally adopted, there are still some challenges to make this way of fresh water production more sustainable and scale it up further. The high energy consumption and discharge of concentrated saline streams require innovative solutions, which can be found in the use of renewable energy sources, production of hydrogen and alternative raw materials for the industry, respectively.

The market for offshore, multi-use structures, such as man-made islands, is large. In Belgium, man-made islands are considered an element for coastal protection against the rise in sea levels. Making these coastal protection islands multifunctional could make a significant contribution to their financial affordability.

North Sea Aquaculture addresses three challenges: innovative cultivation techniques of shellfish and seaweeds, efficient use of space of the Belgian North Sea and development of a market for new local marine products (photo © Gust Lesage, DEME Group).

The North Sea is extremely suitable for growing seaweed, but we are not putting enough effort in it yet. In SeaConomy, a consortium of companies, sector organisations and government bodies shows the potential of the Flemish seaweed economy.