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Comment by L_226 | Hacker News Reader

My startup is working on novel microalgae photobioreactors - we are raising an angel/pre-seed round right now.

Our system is far more energy and space efficient compared to PBRs and raceways - we do this via a proprietary mechanism that greatly increases surface area to volume ratio of liquid water in our reactors. Feel free to drop us a line at info[at]skyfarmclimate.tech

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I once read a comment from an expert in that field who said that it was essentially impossible to prevent contamination, and that they had to constantly test and then shut down and sanitize when they discovered a different species of algae in their system.

How do you mitigate that issue? (And good news if you have a solution, that same person said they figured whoever solved that problem would be the world's first trillionaire).

Mitigation strategies are varied, you basically cannot guarantee there will not be any contamination if you are doing any kind of scale. We are looking at polycultures/consortiums (robust ecosystems inside one reactor), various filtration systems and high frequency monitoring. There are some others we won't publish (yet)

I used to be on a research project that attempted to do this with a fungus/algae mix because when grown together the fungus suspended the algae throughout the column of water. That was a fun project that had it's funding pulled, and then I had to get into software engineering to make a living. What's the basic way of accomplishing your improvement?

I can share further details by email, but the gist is we enable much faster gas exchange for microalgae cells compared to existing systems, inside a unique reactor design that gives us some other benefits for common cultivation processes.

What do you dto with the algae after it has grown?

Sell it

Are you by chance growing spirulina algae? It's a popular supplement.

Not at the moment - but it is an option for the future. Technically it is a cyanobacteria not microalgae

Technically both…

Your website makes it sound like you're growing algae for co2 capture, but if you're selling it and not sequestering it then what's the point?

We're selling it as biochar, sorry should have specified.

Weird. So you are supposedly beating everyone in terms of yields and yet focus on producing something worth even less than protein per kg. Wouldn't it make more sense to cream off the market on higher value-added products before scaling up while expanding into increasingly low value products?

if you're trying to sequester carbon.. bury it. anything else will allow it to be released back into the atmosphere anyway

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