 Thanks, everyone. I'm Dr. Regina Henry from the University of the West in these in Cave Hill Barbados. I'm an MIT-trained mechanical engineer and now working on renewable energy questions in the Caribbean. OK, so Roman Sargasum. It's a little more fun than Roman Cook, but so let's talk about it for the next seven minutes. OK, Caribbean nations pay the highest energy bills in the world because of fossil fuel dependency and the high cost of shipping fossil fuels to all of these small islands. Our team, a group of students, they all sit at any third row. We brainstorm and tested a biofuel solution this summer to the transportation and energy needs of Barbados. Our data analysis this summer kind of showed us that the decline in sugarcane industry in Barbados would not be enough to sustain a biofuel industry as a feedstock for the national energy demand. We were trying to model Brazil and scale it down to Barbados and it didn't seem to be promising, so then we deliberated. All right, so this is the group of scientists and this is some of the equipment we had on campus, brainstorming this biofuel solution for Barbados. So let me tell you a story. Well, let's start in the history of the Caribbean. Caribbean countries are unique in that most of the populations comprise of the descendants of West Africans that were brought over to the Western Hemisphere as captured slaves. So I put the triangular trait there as a reminder from history. So this triangle had three passages. The first passage took product from Europe, refined product from Europe to West Africa. The second passage, which we call the middle passage, brought captured men and women from the coast of West Africa to the Caribbean islands. And the third passage took raw agricultural product from the Caribbean to Europe to be refined and marketed for distribution around the world. All right, so thus the triangle thrived for three centuries. There was a saving grace in the story and it was rum. The rum industry grew out of waste from the sugarcane industry. And because it was waste, it stayed in the islands. But the beauty of it is the rum industry grew out of the islands and now the international rum industry is dominated by Caribbean rum. Another beauty about the rum industry is the wastewater it produces is optimal for producing biofuel because of the high chemical oxygen demand of wastewater from the rum. And every day, thousands of liters of rum distillery waste fluid is produced in the Caribbean and can be used for biofuel. Right now it's just kind of tossed into the ocean. OK, biomethane can cheaply and easily power electric grids and power vehicles. So a regular internal combustion engine car, which I think most of the people in this room drive, could be readily converted to a CNG engine using a CNG conversion kit. And thus it's able to drive fully on biomethane. And that's being done all around the world right now. Barbados has an extensive natural gas grid. So that's a second graphic. And actually, this grid can be retrofitted for biogas as Barbados transitions to 100% renewable energy by the year 2030. An aerobic digestion of any biological feedstock can be used towards methane production. It's a multi-step process, but the most important step is hydrolysis, the first step. And that takes a lot of water. Barbados and a lot of Caribbean islands are water scarce. So the rum distillery waste idea is perfect, because that's thousands of liters of wastewater produced every day on these islands. OK, so we looked at published numbers from Brazil and Barbados and made some kind of analysis to do comparisons. And you can see on the plot on the right the number. This is the sugarcane produced in Barbados compared to Brazil, scaled by production in the year 2007. And as you could see, sugarcane is only decline in Barbados. So we needed another feedstock based on the numbers. So Brittany, the student at the front right, she came up with the, she was driving home on a taxi. And she saw huge mounds of sargassum seaweed on the beach. And Koreans removing these mounds of sargassum seaweed to take them off to the landfill. And she thought, why don't we look at sargassum seaweed? So she came into the lab and said, let's try sargassum. And I said, sure, let's try sargassum. So interestingly enough, in the most poetic turn of events, let me tell you about sargassum. This is an image from NASA Earth Observatory. The sargassum seaweed is now traversing the same middle passage. It's leaving the coast of West Africa. It's coming across the Atlantic Ocean. And it's inundating the Caribbean Sea because of runoff from South and North America. There's this massive bloom right at the Caribbean Sea. So right now, sargassum maps show that it's actually producing more biomass than any, than the total of these islands, abilities to produce biomass. It's more biomass than we could produce on these tiny islands. OK. After weeks of thinking about sugarcane, though, on history and everything, when I saw this 2018 map produced by Brooks in Maryland, it reminded me of our other triangle. So I thought, what's an interesting story? And I decided to tell the story this way. All right, so what did we do in the lab? We harvested some sargassum from the south coast of Barbados. And we put it in the lab with different rum distillery fluids from rum distilleries around Barbados and looked at different conditions of producing biofuel. And so what did our results show? Well, the results are in and they're good. Combined with rum distillery waste from two of the bigger distilleries in Barbados, we found that the methane output was comparable to any standard grasses, the output that we saw in Barbados before and in other parts of the world. So this here is just the rum distilleries, sorry, this is the natural gas grid of Barbados. Right now we're seeing the yellow dots show where the rum distilleries are along the grid. Three of the four major distilleries are actually located within the LNG grid. And so we are proposing a project where we put down pilots on all of the four distilleries, produce bio-methane and test it on CNG converted cars in the next year and a half. The estimated total of our project, our future project is 94,000 US dollars. Right now, it seems like this idea touches on all the sustainable development goals. And I think it seems like mother it's reparations to these free people now, children of former slaves. It's within the writing of a historic rung and it's beginning of the end of an antagonistic journey from the coast of West Africa to the islands of the Caribbean. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much, Le Gina. And I believe that several of the students that participated are in the audience. So thank you to them too.