A major challenge for meaningful biofuels and biobased products 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 supply the U.S. with all of its oil needs. 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 the resultant biomass.
Verpond is also developing technologies to convert the biomass into consumer products like biofuels, fertilizers, animal feeds, and high protein food products. The goal is to generate sustainable products with desirable consumer characteristics at high volumes and competitive prices that will lead to substantive and long term environmental benefits.