The documents behind a program.
A regulator's permit, a completed research agreement with NOAA, the control regime a discharge is held under, the oversight arrangement written into every contract, and the published physics underneath all of it. Each with the body that issued it and a way to reach it.
The register
What each record establishes, and what it does not.
| Document | Issued by | What it establishes | Where to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Permit FLOA00062 | Florida DEP, South District Office | A bounded red tide trial, examined and allowed | The regulator, plus two Florida write-ups |
| Completed CRADA with NOAA | The agency and this company, via AMURI | Toxins neutralized rather than precipitated. Our own account. The term has ended | A private instrument. Raised in diligence |
| Research since, with other laboratories | Arizona State University, MEDRC and more | Where the work went after the CRADA, and at what scale | Some published; the rest is commercial |
| The service level agreement | Alarivean, with the consenting authority | The limits that apply to your receiving water, bromate among them | The permit file, and the program scope |
| NCCOS releases, 2018 and 2020 | NOAA NCCOS | The approach clears what it is aimed at, on other parties' hardware | Both releases are public |
| Nanobubble stability and mass transfer | Academic authors, unconnected to us | How sub-micron bubbles hold charge and move gas | The journals, some paywalled |
| The oversight arrangement | The institution engaged for the program | Who reads the live feeds, and from which date | The program scope, and the institution |
| Throughput and tier capabilities | Alarivean | What we contract to deliver | Measured during the calibration phase |
The permit Florida issued
In September 2024 the Florida Department of Environmental Protection granted permit FLOA00062 to Alarivean, Inc. of Scottsdale, Arizona, through its South District Office, under Chapter 403 of the Florida Statutes. The window runs five years. It is conditional: the trial may only run while live Karenia brevis is in the water above 100,000 cells per liter, which ties the permit to the event it was written to address.
The craft named in it is a modified personal watercraft producing ozonated seawater at 1,000 to 2,000 gallons a minute — the permit's own unit, kept as written. It is a far smaller boat than a SeaBreather hull, and the two figures should never be read as one.
Two Florida organizations documented the grant on their own sites: the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, which put technical support into the application and deliberately no money, and the nonprofit START. Neither account was drafted by us.
The permit establishes that a regulator with jurisdiction allowed a bounded trial. It does not establish efficacy in open water. The estuary program's interest is in monitoring that work when it happens — taking no money is what leaves it free to publish whatever the water says — and we want its instruments on the next result rather than only ours.
The NOAA agreement, and where the work went afterward
Alarivean completed the term of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NOAA, entered through AMURI. It has ended. There is no active CRADA today and nobody here should tell you there is. CRADAs are private instruments between an agency and its research partner and are not published, which is ordinary and not a warning sign.
Work under it with the NOAA scientist Dr Peter Moeller established that the treatment neutralizes toxins rather than dropping them out of solution as a solid. Those are different outcomes and they land on different people. Precipitation moves the problem into the sediment and leaves it there for whoever owns the bed; in a shallow basin the next storm hands it back.
Dr Moeller still advises, and still tests what we send him. That is the shape the collaboration takes now — advisory and verification input, not a signed instrument, and no part of it is an endorsement. Federal agencies do not endorse commercial products and none has put its name behind a vessel of ours.
The obvious follow-up is where the research went. The original agreement was built around one nanobubble generator this company has since moved past, so the work moved with the question: Arizona State University, with Dr Sergi Garcia-Segura, Dr Jesús Morón-López and colleagues; the Middle East Desalination Research Center; and more. Their facilities suit the scale we wanted to test next. That was a decision about scale rather than a falling out with anybody.
Published physics this platform runs on
Gas bubbles below roughly a micron are a characterized class of object with a literature of their own. None of it is ours and none of it was funded by us.
They carry surface charge — oxygen nanobubbles measure around −34 to −45 millivolts in water — and that charge is why they resist coalescing and stay suspended instead of rising out. Divide a fixed volume of gas into small enough spheres and the interface across which it can cross into the water becomes enormous.
The number with commercial consequences is mass transfer. Work published in Science of the Total Environment on nanobubble aeration puts the gas–liquid mass transfer coefficient at roughly eleven times that of conventional bubbles for the same gas delivered. Adjacent aeration literature reports enhancement factors spread from about one and a half to nine, so eleven sits at the top of a wide band rather than being a constant of nature. Send it to your own people. A program sized on the top of that band is a different economic proposition from one sized on the middle, and which of the two is being written into your agreement gets settled beforehand rather than during it.
Two NCCOS releases, and a four-letter collision
NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science validated an ozone nanobubble aeration system on an eight-acre pond near Fort Myers Beach in 2018: algae gone within 48 hours, the water properly reoxygenated, no apparent harm to aquatic life. In 2020 an NCCOS-affiliated evaluation ran a commercial nanobubble ozone system through ballast-water testing and found it effective against algae, bacteria and motile zooplankton, with no statistically significant residual toxicity in the receiving water.
Both releases concern other parties' equipment, and the 2020 system abbreviates to the same four letters this network uses — its Nanobubble Ozone Technology against our Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology, different hardware in different water. They establish that this approach clears what it is aimed at. Neither is a test of a SeaBreather.
Settled in writing first
Four things a program fixes before a hull moves.
Each is agreed on a bounded area of your own water, in writing, before a hull is committed to it.
Where the published record stops
Nobody has published an open-water result for this class of treatment yet, and that includes us. Everything in the literature sits at pond scale, or inside a ballast tank.
The first reading on your water comes out of the calibration phase, taken on a defined area by an institution that does not work for us, against parameters fixed before a vessel arrives.
The radical chemistry is disputed
Whether nanobubbles themselves generate hydroxyl radicals is an open argument. Moleaer and Arizona State University reported reactive oxygen species in 2020. A controlled 2023 study by Chae and colleagues in ACS ES&T Engineering found that generation was minimal, if it occurred at all, under the conditions tested.
No part of a program's price depends on those radicals being real.
Bromate is governed by a regime, not by a published ceiling
Ozone meets bromide in seawater roughly 83 times more readily than it meets chloride, which is why the reaction is enclosed and instrumented rather than started in your bay. The governing limit is the one that applies to your receiving water, agreed with the authority consenting the work and written into the service level agreement before deployment. We publish no fixed ceiling, because a bay is not a public utility water stream and a drinking-water figure is the wrong test for open sea.
Formation is conditional too. Significant bromate needs a threshold of bromide present, which salt and brackish water do not always carry, and ozone reacts indiscriminately, so bromide competes with every other dissolved carbon molecule in the column. Then the controls: bromate reads in real time, treatment modulates or stops on that reading, your oversight body holds the same data live, and you can halt an active deployment on any suspected breach until it is cleared. Desalination intakes, the case people worry about most, already run equipment that handles bromate.
What changes between a pond and a bay
Tide, wind, stratification and a bloom that moves overnight decide how far treated water and the oxygen it carries travel before the bay takes them back. Open coastal water is a different engineering problem, not a larger version of the same one.
That difference is a sizing question — how many hulls, how many hours, where the effort concentrates — and it gets answered on your water rather than inferred from a pond trial run on other people's hardware.
While a program runs
Who else is holding the readings.
Everything above existed before you called. This is the record a live program makes, week by week, and who stands next to it as it lands.
Independent scientific oversight is designed into a program rather than granted when somebody asks for it. Whoever already answers for that water locally — a marine institute, a fisheries directorate, a university department, an estuary body — is engaged from the site read and stays engaged for as long as the program runs, hull in the water or not. They read the same water-quality feeds our crews steer by, as those readings land, and they are free to bring instruments we have never touched and data sources we cannot see.
Two parties then hold the record, year after year, and only one of them has a contract to protect. That is what makes an inconvenient finding publishable while the work is still going on, and it is why risk controls run to best practice with human and environmental safety ahead of throughput.
The institution is named in the program scope, with the date its access begins and the feeds it receives. Ring it and ask.
The next document
A calibration result from open water, taken by the overseeing institution against parameters agreed before the vessel arrived. Producing it is what the first phase of a program is for. Our parent, Sophia Delta, keeps the same record.
Asked by technical evaluators
Five answers before the site read
What are you putting into our water?
Your own water, oxygen-enriched, inside limits fixed before anything is deployed. It goes in through an intake, through a closed reactor, and back out where it came from. Nothing is kept aboard, so nothing is carried off.
Oxidant residuals, bromate among them, are held to the limit that actually governs your receiving water. That limit is set case by case with the authority consenting the work and written into the service level agreement, rather than lifted off a standard drafted for drinking water. Bromate reads in real time. The institution overseeing the work sees the same data we do, and you keep the contractual authority to stop a deployment on any suspected breach until it is cleared.
Has NOAA approved or certified any of this?
No, and no agency ever has. Alarivean completed the term of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NOAA, entered via AMURI, and there is no active CRADA now.
What continues is Dr Peter Moeller's advisory and verification input. Research since has gone where the facilities fit the next scale we needed to test: Arizona State University, the Middle East Desalination Research Center and more. Federal agencies do not endorse commercial products, and none has put its name behind a vessel of ours.
Is there a published open-water result for this class of treatment?
No open-water result has been published for this class of treatment, ours or anyone else's. What is published runs to pond scale and to ballast-tank scale.
The calibration phase produces the first reading on your own water, on a bounded area, taken by the institution overseeing the program against parameters agreed in advance.
What does the Florida permit establish?
That Florida's environmental regulator examined a red tide mitigation proposal under Chapter 403 and allowed a bounded field trial in September 2024, on a five-year window conditional on live Karenia brevis above 100,000 cells per liter.
It establishes nothing about efficacy in open water. Ask the regulator for the file directly; that route does not pass through us.
Who holds the readings while a program runs?
The local institution engaged for the life of the program, named in the program scope with the date its access begins.
It reads the live water-quality feeds our crews steer by as they land, and may bring instruments and data sources of its own. The record ends up in two places rather than one.
Published sources, with their issuers
- Sarasota Bay Estuary Program — Director's note: permit received for red tide study, 2024.
- START (Solutions To Avoid Red Tide) — Mobile system to attack red tide, 2024.
- NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science — Nanobubble technology validated for remediation of harmful freshwater algal blooms, 26 September 2018.
- NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science — Nanobubble ozone technology shown to safely eliminate invasive species in ballast water, 1 July 2020.
- Science of the Total Environment — Mass transfer of nanobubble aeration and its effect on biofilm growth.
- Springer — Nanobubble stability and zeta potential.
- Chae, Kim, Kim & Fortner — Reactive oxygen species generation from nanobubbles, ACS ES&T Engineering, 2023.
- Ozone: Science & Engineering — Bromate formation in the ozonation of seawater.
Before you commit to anything
Ask what the record says about your bay.
Name the water body, what goes wrong in it, the weeks your exposure sits in, and what a bad season costs. Back comes a site read: what the available evidence says about that water, where the uncertainty sits, who would lead the program, and whether a vessel is the right instrument at all.