The documents behind a program.
A regulator's permit, a completed NOAA research agreement, the control regime a discharge is held under, the cover carried in the operator's own name, the oversight written into the contract, and the published physics underneath. Each with its issuer and a way to check 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 in the reactor, with nothing dropped into sediment. 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 |
| Insurance and indemnity | Alarivean, with the market standing behind each line | Which lines a program carries, and which are confirmed at diligence instead of asserted in public | The company page, then certificates on request |
| 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. A specification: the SeaBreather class is not yet in the water | Measured during the calibration phase |
The permit Florida issued
In September 2024 the Florida Department of Environmental Protection granted permit FLOA00062 to Alarivean, Inc., through its South District Office, under Chapter 403 of the Florida Statutes. The window runs five years, and 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, in the permit's own unit. 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 does not establish efficacy in open water. The estuary program intends to monitor that work when it happens, and we want its instruments on the next result alongside 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. A CRADA is a private instrument between an agency and its research partner, and the agency does not publish it.
Work under it with the NOAA scientist Dr Peter Moeller established that the treatment neutralizes toxins instead of dropping them out of solution as a solid. Precipitation moves the problem into the sediment and leaves it 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: advisory and verification input, under no signed instrument, and no part of it an endorsement. Federal agencies do not endorse commercial products and none has put its name behind a vessel of ours.
The original agreement was built around one nanobubble generator Alarivean has since moved past, and the research 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 next scale we wanted to test. Nobody fell out.
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. Split a fixed volume of gas into small enough spheres and its interface with the water becomes enormous.
Work published in Science of the Total Environment on nanobubble aeration puts the oxygen transfer efficiency at 1.5 times that of coarse bubbles, in a laboratory study of wastewater biofilm. Other aeration comparisons report higher multiples from different setups. Which figure a program is sized on is settled before signature, in the same document as the limits.
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 shares our four letters: its Nanobubble Ozone Technology against our Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology, different hardware in different water. They establish that the approach clears what it is aimed at. Neither is a test of a SeaBreather.
The open questions
Four limits of the record, and how a program handles each.
Where the published record stops
Nobody has published an open-water result for this class of treatment yet, us included. The literature sits at pond scale, or inside a ballast tank.
The first reading on your water comes out of the calibration phase.
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 the limit that applies to your receiving water
Ozone meets bromide in seawater roughly 83 times more readily than it meets chloride, which is why the reaction happens inside a closed reactor with instruments on the outlet. The limit for your receiving water is agreed with the consenting authority and written into the service level agreement before deployment. We publish no fixed ceiling. A drinking-water figure is the wrong test for open sea. Where the authority holds no figure for that water, one is derived by the method a regulator would use, off the published ecotoxicology for the taxa that live there, and it is signed by the authority and the overseeing institution before a hull moves. How the envelope is drawn, case by case.
Formation is conditional too. Significant bromate needs a threshold of bromide, 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. 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 already run equipment that handles bromate.
What changes between a pond and a bay
The difference is exchange. Tide, wind, stratification and a bloom that moves overnight decide how far treated water and its oxygen travel before the bay takes them back; the water you treated today is somewhere else tomorrow, and the cap re-forms behind it.
That is a sizing question — how many hulls, how many hours, where the effort concentrates — and the calibration phase answers it on your water. A pond trial on somebody else's hardware cannot.
While a program runs
Who else is holding the readings.
The record a live program makes, week by week, and who stands next to it as it lands.
Independent scientific oversight is a term of the program, drafted in before anybody signs. 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 for as long as the program runs, hull in the water or not. They read the feeds our crews steer by as the readings land, and may bring instruments we have never touched and data sources we cannot see.
Two parties then hold the record, and only one has a contract to protect. That 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
An open-water calibration result, taken by the overseeing institution against parameters agreed before the vessel arrived. The first phase of a program produces it. 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, drawn through a closed reactor and returned where it came from, with nothing kept aboard. Residuals, bromate among them, are held to the limit the service level agreement sets for your receiving water. Where the authority has set none, the figure is derived for the taxa in that water by the method a regulator would use, and signed by the authority and the overseeing institution.
Has NOAA approved or certified any of this?
No, and no agency ever has. Alarivean completed the term of a CRADA with NOAA, entered via AMURI; there is no active CRADA now. Dr Peter Moeller's advisory and verification input continues, research since has run with Arizona State University, the Middle East Desalination Research Center and more, and federal agencies do not endorse commercial products.
Is there a published open-water result for this class of treatment?
No, ours or anyone else's. Published work stops at pond and ballast-tank scale. The calibration phase produces the first reading on your own water, taken by the overseeing institution 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. Request the file from the regulator 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 owns its copy of the record and can publish from it while the program runs.
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 it goes wrong and what a bad season costs. Back comes a site read: what the evidence says, where the uncertainty sits, who would lead, and whether a vessel is the right instrument at all.