📋 Tender Overview
Brilliant Planet’s unique idea to capture carbon by creating – and then burying – algal blooms in coastal deserts shows great promise, but it will take hundreds millions of dollars of investment before it can fully achieve its ambitious goals.
In a nutshell, the business revolves around filling ponds in coastal deserts with nutrient-rich seawater and then seeding them with local algae. While Brilliant Planet* initially aimed to convert these algae into aquafeed ingredients, they have since pivoted to drying and burying them, as a form of carbon capture.
It’s a truly unique idea, but the startup’s quietly charismatic founder, Raffael Jovine, makes a strong case for its potential, supported by research gleaned from eight years of field trials in Morocco, Oman and South Africa.
“We’re in a very different place than we were before – we knew that the concept would work in terms of the volumes, but as well as getting much better on the technical and engineering side we now know more from a social and environmental point of view. And, having done a thorough life cycle analysis, we have identified further hotspots for improvement before we scale up,” Jovine explains.
The evolution of a unique concept
A molecular biochemist and biophysicist by training, with a depth of experience in biological engineering – gained at Yale, MIT, UCSB and Woods Hole – Jovine’s path to founding a startup was inspired by field trip to one of the most remote regions of the ocean.
“I ended up at Woods Hole Oceanographic looking at the environmental triggers behind harmful algal blooms and why some organisms respond more than others. At the time the goal was to stop blooms and reduce them,” he recalls.
However, it also made him consider that doing the opposite – creating algal blooms – could potentially help provide a solution to climate change.
“When on assignment in the Central Pacific Gyre, I realised that the organisms in the middle of the gyre, despite the lack of nutrients, were photosynthetically much more effective than anything I could engineer in the lab,” he recalls.
The discovery inspired Jovine to formulate a concept that was good enough to reach the longlist for the – later-to-be-cancelled – Virgin Earth Challenge, so he decided to patent it, in 2008. Since then the idea has evolved considerably, as has the company name – which morphed from Johna, to FeedAlgae, to SuSeWi before Brilliant Planet was born.
“There was no carbon market at the time, so we looked at using the algae for livestock and aquaculture feed. We did lots of feed trials and got fantastic results – the algae were rich in protein and omega-3s. But it was always going to take a long time to fit into the big feed producers’ schemes: to get to a size where we could fill a silo at an attractive price point. However, the carbon market has since developed, and we realised that if we cut out a lot of the post-harvest processing needed to get the algae into fish feed, we could be low enough cost for carbon,” he explains.
According to Jovine, this has allowed them to concentrate almost purely on the production – rather than processing – of the algae, and they’ve identified areas for further improvements.
One such area relates to finding the most efficient species of algae, following extensive trials in their London lab.
“For biofuels the cells divide once every 18 to 21 days, depending on what scheme you use, but our cells divide more than once per day and there are some organisms that divide as much as five-and-a-half times a day, so there’s still room for improvement. We like large organisms that are easy to harvest, easy to manipulate, and are fast growing,” reflects Jovine.
While they plan to concentrate on producing a single species per location, they are considering changing their species according to the season – for example, using one for the summer and another for the winter. However, they are not able to use genetically engineered algae, as they farm in open systems.
“Whatever we grow will escape into the environment, so it’s very important that we work with natural, local organisms the way they are,” he emphasises.
Pond management is another area where progress is being made.
“We can run our ponds a little bit warmer than the local surface seawater – in Morocco our ponds are two degrees hotter than the sea, which has a significant productivity boost,” notes Jovine.
Equally, they have discovered that the shape of the ponds and the rate of water intake can significantly impact productivity. And the team have also been delving deep into the photo and nutrient physiologies of algae.
“We look at the fundamental cell physiology – what is it that’s limiting the growth – and we’re uniquely strong on measuring instant growth. At any moment I can tell you exactly how fast the algae are growing – and so we can measure the impact of, for example, a cloud passing over the pond,” he explains.
“As for the nutrient physiology, even though we work in areas with nutrient-rich sea water there’s never enough nutrients around, never enough carbon around. But we are much better than nature, because we manipulate the system – by optimising the conditions in the ponds we’re taking as much as 10 times more CO2 out of the seawater than would happen with a natural algal bloom offshore,” he adds.
While Brilliant Planet do add nutrients to the ponds, this is done carefully, and on a seasonal basis. The main source of their nutrients currently comes from a local phosphate facility operated by OCP, which Jovine says has a “very green” method for producing phosphate or ammonia.
“What we don’t want to do is feed competitor organisms or dump nutrients that will then create eutrophication offshore. If you look at normal algal production recipes you add 880 micromoles of nitrate, but we only add around 30 micromoles. It’s very targeted,” he explains.
