Roughly 70 million dry tons of macroalgae are cultivated and harvested worldwide in offshore and near-shore coastal farms.
This production scale is mostly for food applications.
Cultured brown algae are harvested by both manual and mechanical methods.
The harvested brown algae are then normally treated with milling to reduce biomass sizes for efficient saccharification or
alginate extraction(Fig. 2).
The saccharified broth can be used for bioethanol fermentation.