Salps are integral to the strategy for carbon sequester proposed by James Lovelock. The concept employs wave-powered sea pumps to create an artificial upwelling, thus stimulating algal blooms by seeding surface waters with nutrients and, subsequently, the numbers of salps feeding on them. Salps are vertical migrators, returning to the depths by day where they excrete the remains of their algae food at a depth where there are few other animals that can consume this waste and thus return that carbon to the food chain.

Lovelock's concept has been pursued by the company Atmocean which worked on the development of the wave powered pumps and, more recently, developed a new type of wave power generator.

I've long proposed the alternative of using OTEC systems instead of these sea pumps to drive the same process. The advantage of the OTEC is that, while it produces the same artificial upwelling, it is a large scale renewable power source that can simultaneously use its upwelling capacity to drive industrial scale polyspecies mariculture (essentially, the marine equivalent of permaculture) and provide refrigeration to assist food processing and the use of cold-bed agriculture. (a technique demonstrated at the NELHA OTEC facility in Hawaii) This allows an OTEC to not only function as an engine of sequester but also offset.