Mother Reef

De Challenge

Our oceans are empty. Oyster reefs used to cover 20-30% of the North Sea, now 95% of them are gone. This is a tragic loss, they were homes and nurseries to legions of juvenille fish, crabs and lobsters. They filtered our water from sewage including stikstof (nitrogen) and phosphates, and protected our coasts from erosion. Now, for the first time, our society is ready to value them for the jobs they are doing, however, there is no cost effective way to bring them back.

De Solution

Our IP protected Mother Reef, is clay based. It is biodegradeable, low-cost (similar price to household bricks), low carbon, made from natural materials and easy to handle. Marine regeneration is not a new exercise, but our product reduces the cost and increases the scale of potential projects by multiple orders of magnitude.

Oyster Heaven delivers mimimum 5ha projects, in smartly selected coastal regions that use local fishermen as the deployment force and then stewards of these new oceanic gardens. These reefs are tailored to grow and repair themselves on their own to and are the fastest way to return life to our deserted seas.

De Businesscase

Oyster Heaven works with organisations to deliver a reef, in what we call the 50:50 partnership. The partner brings the financial support, Oyster Heaven brings the hours of expertise, monitoring, IP, management and deployment. Once the reef is built, each partner owns 50% of the output.

What output is this?

Not oysters, these oysters are not for eating.

The output we are looking at are the carbon, biodiversity and nitrogen credits that these reefs generate. We estimate a 5ha reef might cost around EUR 750.000 to deploy. The value of the nitrogen credits alone over the 7 year lifetime of the project might be EUR 4-6 million.