PILOT FACILITY
HR BioPetroleum’s technology has been validated in production of algae oil and antioxidants / carotenoids such as astaxanthan, at a five-acre, large-scale pilot operation located in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. Over a period of several years, Dr. Mark Huntley, CSO and a co-founder of the Company, has utilized a proprietary two-stage algae cultivation system at this site. This novel approach to algae production overcame a number of key challenges that had historically limited the viability of large-scale algae production – namely, open-pond contamination and low productivity.
The pilot facility consists of 25,000-liter “production” photobioreactors (PBRs) and 50,000-liter open ponds, with a total capacity of greater than 600,000 liters, equally divided between photobioreactors and open ponds. This system utilizes our ALDUO™ technology.
The key advancement made by Dr. Huntley and his co-inventor, Dr. Donald Redalje, was to couple the continuous, large-scale production of a pure culture of algae in the sterile, controlled photobioreactors, with the larger-capacity open ponds used for large-scale production; sustained growth was achieved, and contamination was successfully avoided, following transfer of the algae from the PBRs to the open ponds by drastically reducing the residence time for open-pond production prior to harvesting.
As reported by Drs. Huntley and Redalje in a 2006 paper describing their breakthrough results, entitled “CO2 Mitigation and Renewable Oil from Photosynthetic Microbes: A New Appraisal” (from Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Springer, 2006), “[t]he key to success is to reduce the residence time in the open ponds, where cultures are susceptible to contamination. This can be done only by providing a continuous supply of uncontaminated inoculum in large volume, which requires industrial scale photobioreactors. The coupled system minimizes cost. In a coupled system, photobioreactors provide a continuous source of single-species culture in ample quantity to inoculate the open ponds, allowing the batch cultures in open ponds to exhaust the nutrient supply in a short time, thus avoiding the perils of contamination by other species.”