Production of aquaculture feed ingredients using open pond algae cultivation  

Sapphire's algae production platform provides a highly effective, low- cost technology to produce scalable quantities of biomass that can be used to produce nutritional oils, proteins, and other high value pharmaceuticals. The algae meal produced can be utilized as a component in many different animals' feed rations, or isolated components of the algae can be incorporated.

Important considerations for a production system include selection of algae strain based on robustness, productivity, biochemical composition, etc., as well as the development of quality control systems to ensure that foreign material is excluded from the product and that final product meets appropriate specifications.

Sapphire's capabilities in algae production span four key areas: strain creation, cultivation, harvest, and product formulation. First, Sapphire screens and develops proprietary algae strains at its state-of-the-art laboratories in California and New Mexico.  Second, cultivation technology improvements (such as enhanced liquid growth media, pest management, and pond and harvest design) are engineered to enable algae to be grown as a crop, at unprecedented scale and low- cost. After screening at our scale up site, production of algae at large scale takes place at our facility in Columbus, New Mexico. One of the largest intensive algae facilities in the world, this 100 acre facility has been growing algae since 2012 and had produced several hundred tons of harvested biomass. Third, harvest technology has been repurposed from the wastewater treatment industry and then uniquely modified to separate algae from its water growth medium without imparting undesirable characteristics to the algal slurry. Finally, Sapphire has developed extraction technology to complete the product formulation process, generating both omega-3 and -7  oils, carotenoids, and defatted biomass as finished products.