Israel’s Seambiotic, a leader in the development and production of marine microalgae for the nutraceutical and biofuel industries, announced that its U.S. subsidiary, Seambiotic USA, has entered into an agreement with NASA Glenn Research Center to develop an on-going collaborative R&D program for optimization of open-pond microalgae growth processes.
Under the Agreement, NASA Glenn and Seambiotic USA will work together
to improve production processes and to study and qualify algae oil from
alternative species and production processes as candidate aviation fuel
at NASA’s test facilities.
"Under a Space Act Agreement, NASA is partnering with Seambiotic USA to model growth processes for microalgae for use as aviation biofuel feedstock," said Prof. Ami Ben-Amotz, Chief Scientific Adviser to Seambiotic. "The goal of the Agreement is to make use of NASA’s expertise in large scale computational modeling and combine it with Seambiotic’s biological process modeling to make advances in biomass process cost reduction."
The NASA Glenn Research Center is one of NASA’s 10 field centers addressing NASA’s mission to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.
Seambiotic Ltd., located in Ashkelon, Israel was founded in 2003. The company’s research efforts include a pilot study at an Israeli Electric Corporation power station near the city Ashkelon, Israel, where various species of marine microalgae have been successfully cultivated using the power station’s CO2 emissions released directly from their smokestacks; the microalgae are in turn used as feedstock for biofuel. The company is currently in transition from the pilot plant stage to large scale industrial algae cultivation and production.
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