Verpond has designed an algal cultivation system and process that does not compete with current agricultural and other food production systems for most resources and has ample available high insolation area for cultivation. As a result, it is scalable for bioproducts production in a way that is meaningful compared to current world output. The system is designed with low infrastructure and operating costs, and our analyses indicate that it is feasible to produce biomass feedstocks profitably for about 1/10 the lowest projected price of large-scale growth of algae produced by conventional means. Verpond aims to develop its cultivation system and process along with technologies for conversion of the algal feedstocks into bioproducts.
A major challenge for meaningful bioproducts production is that it shouldn't interfere with current agricultural production or, for that matter, any other food production or rich natural habitat. This is important, because our calculations indicate that it could take an area as large as the state of California (about 425,000 km2) to produce enough algal biomass to meaningfully supplement U.S. supplies of critical materials like foods, feeds, fertilizers, fuels, and chemicals. This also represents a huge use of precious water resources if conventional racetrack pond algae production techniques are used.
As a result, Verpond has invented OAACS™, a patent protected large scale aquatic algae cultivation system for operation in biologically sparse ocean waters, which represents a huge area of approximately 75,000,000 km2. Previously, large scale growth of algae in the ocean has been proposed to help mitigate the effects of global climate change. These proposals involve seeding the oceans with iron (a limiting nutrient) and relying on carbon dioxide offset credits to provide revenues. The algae would be dispersed throughout the ocean and not provide a source of revenue. Verpond’s proposal is very different. It involves design of a cultivation system that contains the growing culture within the system, separated from the surrounding ocean, and generation of profits from harvesting the resultant biomass and converting it into consumer products.
Verpond is also developing technologies to convert the biomass into consumer products like high protein food products, animal feeds, fertilizers, fuels, and chemicals. The goal is to generate large new supplies of products with desirable consumer characteristics at high volumes and competitive prices that will lead to substantive and long-term improvements to critical materials supplies.