Sorted by who made it, not by how good it sounds.
We are the party that gains if you believe all of this. So the ordering is not ours to choose — it runs by provenance, and the weakest tier is labelled as the weakest.
Read this the way you would read a stranger's references. Not for what it asserts, but for what it can be measured against, and for how it behaves at the point where the record runs out.
Six tiers follow. Two can be checked before lunch. One cannot be checked at all by anyone outside the agreement it sits under, and that is written on the line rather than buried underneath it. The last tier is our own description of our own equipment, which is worth precisely nothing until somebody else has measured it, and it is where most of what any supplier tells you actually lives.
None of this is a substitute for putting the material in front of your own scientists. It is an attempt to save them the first afternoon.
The map before the argument
Six tiers, and what each one is worth.
| Tier | The item | Who made it | Reachable without us | What it settles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One | Florida DEP permit FLOA00062 | A state environmental regulator | Yes — from the regulator, or from two Florida bodies who wrote it up | That a bounded field trial was examined and allowed |
| Two | United States trademark 7292856 | The USPTO register | Yes — the register is open | That a name is registered. Nothing technical whatsoever |
| Three | Nanobubble stability and mass transfer | Academic authors with no relationship to us | Yes — in the journals, some of it paywalled | How sub-micron bubbles behave and move gas into water |
| Four | NOAA NCCOS testing, 2018 and 2020 | A federal science agency | Yes — both releases are public | That this class of treatment clears what it is aimed at, on other parties' machines |
| Five | A research agreement with NOAA | The agency and this company, privately | No. CRADAs are not published | That the research happened. Not that anyone approved anything |
| Six | Throughput, treatment rates, capability lists | Us | No | Nothing yet. A specification waiting for a measurement |
Tier one — a document Florida's regulator 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 when live Karenia brevis is in the water above 100,000 cells per litre, which means the permit can only be exercised during 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.
Two Florida organisations with nothing to gain from us documented the grant on their own sites: the Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme, which put technical support into the application and deliberately no money, and the nonprofit START. Neither account was drafted by us or shown to us first.
What that establishes is narrow, and we are not going to stretch it. A regulator with jurisdiction read a proposal and decided the risk of a bounded trial was acceptable. Two local scientific bodies thought it notable. Efficacy in open water is not in there anywhere.
The estuary programme's public position is that open-water performance has not been demonstrated. That is accurate. What a search result strips away is the intent behind it: they want to be the ones holding the instruments when that evidence is finally produced, and we want them holding them too. Taking no money from us is what leaves them free to publish the answer we would hate. Nothing has been published for efficacy and nothing has been published against it. Producing the first result either way is the next piece of work, and it is meant to be theirs to report.
Tier two — a line on a public register
SEABREATHER is a live United States trademark, registration number 7292856. The register is open to anybody and the check takes about a minute: the record is here.
That is the entire claim. A registration settles a question about a name and settles nothing about a hull, a gas dose or a bay. It is also not a patent — separate register, separate question, and a supplier who lets the two blur together has told you something useful about how they handle the rest of their evidence. We have found no patent filing under these names, which is not proof that none exists, and we will not cite a position we have not seen.
Tier three — physics published by people with no stake in us
Gas bubbles below roughly a micron are a characterised 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 that gas 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.
Here is the caveat, in the body of the page where a reviewer will see it. We have not read that paper beyond its abstract, which is paywalled. Adjacent aeration literature reports enhancement factors spread across a band from about one and a half to nine. Eleven sits at the top of that band rather than being a constant of nature. Send it to your own people. If the multiplier they will sign off on is four rather than eleven, the physics still points the same way and the economics of a mobile treatment stage get considerably harder — and you would want to know which of those you are buying before a season, not during one.
What the physics does not settle is chemistry. That argument is live, and it sits further down under the things that are still open.
Tier four — an agency's test of equipment that is not ours
NOAA's National Centres 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.
The four letters that will catch you out
Neither release concerns this company. The 2018 work names a system called NABAS. The 2020 work abbreviates another party's Nanobubble Ozone Technology to NBOT — the same four letters this network uses for Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology, on different hardware, in different water, run by somebody else entirely.
Skim for the acronym and the collision reads as corroboration. It is not one. We would rather hand you that than have you find it in week three and wonder what else was arranged to be misread.
Read correctly, the two releases establish something real and something limited: this approach clears what it is aimed at, and it can be run without leaving the receiving water poisoned. Both matter. Neither is a validation of a SeaBreather.
Tier five — a research agreement, which is not a verdict
There is a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement in place between this company and NOAA. Looking for the document will not turn it up. A CRADA is a private instrument between an agency and its research partner and is never posted, so the empty search result carries no information in either direction — a point worth holding on to, because a missing public record is exactly the sort of thing a hurried reviewer marks down as a finding.
Work carried out under it with the NOAA scientist Dr Peter Moeller established something specific about inorganic toxins. The treatment can sterilise them by disabling the functional groups that make them toxic, rather than dropping the material out of solution as a solid. Sterilising and precipitating are not the same outcome. One leaves the toxin disabled in the water column; the other leaves it on the bottom as somebody's future problem, and a reviewer should always ask which of the two is being claimed.
That is our account of our own research. It is given to you as such, and it stays in this tier until an outside party publishes on it.
Now the line we would rather write ourselves than have written about us. Agreeing to investigate something alongside a company is not approval of what that company sells. No federal agency has put its name behind a vessel of ours, none has been asked to, and any page anywhere on this network that reads as though one had is an error. Tell us and it will be fixed.
Tier six — us, describing our own equipment
Throughput figures. Treatment rates. Tier capabilities and the list of stressors we say the platform can work on. All of it originates here, and no outside party has measured any of it in a document we can put in your hand.
Treat every line of it as a specification we are offering to be held to, not as a finding. It converts into evidence in one place only: a calibration phase on a bounded area of your own water, with viability parameters written down and agreed before anything runs, and a negative result treated as a legitimate outcome rather than as the start of an argument.
The section your reviewer will open first
Four things that are genuinely unresolved.
Every one of these is a reason to run a calibration phase before committing a season. None of them is a reason to stop reading, and a supplier who could not name them would be the one to worry about.
No open-water result exists — ours or anyone's
The published record for this class of treatment stops at pond scale and ballast-tank scale. Nobody has put a peer-reviewed open-water result into the literature, for this platform or for any competing one.
That is the single most useful thing to know before you read anyone's proposal about a bay, including ours.
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.
Nothing we sell is priced on those radicals being real. Be careful with anyone whose pitch is.
Bromate is an operating obligation
Ozone reacts with bromide in seawater roughly 83 times more readily than with chloride, and the hypobromite that follows can carry through to bromate. The levers are known — dose, contact time, pH, temperature — and every one of them trades against disinfection.
So this is a monitored parameter with a limit, a reading and a reporting line attached to it. Any shorter answer is not an answer.
A bay is not a large pond
Tide, wind, dilution, stratification and a bloom that moves overnight make open coastal water a different engineering problem, not a scaled-up version of the same one. Contact time is the first thing you lose.
Establishing what survives that transition, on your water rather than in a brochure, is the entire purpose of the calibration phase.
Our own corrections
Figures we published, and have taken down.
This company's earlier material carried numbers that a research pass could not trace to a primary source. They have come off. Listing them is more useful to you than deleting them quietly, because you would have found at least two of them yourself.
| What we used to say | What a source check found | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| Around 65 per cent of United States estuaries and coastal waters are moderately to severely degraded, attributed to NOAA | No NOAA document carrying it. The only page we could find the sentence on was our own | Withdrawn |
| Lake Erie blooms reduced property values by an estimated $11 billion | NOAA Fisheries puts lost shoreline property-value services for the 2014 Toledo event at $10.05 million — four orders of magnitude away | Withdrawn. The documented event figure is used where it is relevant |
| Addressing nutrient pollution could avoid climate-related costs of up to $24 trillion | No primary source located | Withdrawn |
| Lake Erie emits methane and nitrous oxide equivalent to 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year | No primary source located | Withdrawn |
| Ocean goods and services carry an annual value of $2.5 trillion | OECD measures the ocean economy at US$2.6 trillion of gross value added in 2020 — a different quantity, reached by a different method | Withdrawn. Where the size of the ocean economy matters, the OECD figure is cited with its definition attached |
| Tabla-Hernandez and colleagues, 2020, cited on three pages to support nanobubble pollutant precipitation | The citation could not be located in academic search | Withdrawn, along with the claims that rested on it |
An FAO nitrogen statistic went the same way, and for the same reason: it could not be found on FAO's own site or anywhere in the independent literature.
None of those was a deliberate untruth. They are what happens when a figure travels from a slide into a web page and nobody walks it back to the source. The useful thing for you to take from this section is not the six rows. It is how a supplier behaves at the moment it discovers it was wrong.
Every figure on this site now carries a link you can open, and where a source is regional reporting rather than an agency document the copy says the claim is indicative. Where published estimates diverge across orders of magnitude, no headline number is printed at all. And anything we tell you a programme will achieve on your own bay arrives after the site read, in writing, with the assumptions it depends on printed underneath it.
While a programme runs
The other copy of the record is not ours.
Everything above concerns evidence that existed before you called. This concerns the evidence a live programme makes, week by week, and who is standing next to it when it does.
Independent scientific oversight is designed into a programme 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 after the last hull has left the zone. 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 season's record, 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 end up run to best practice with human and environmental safety ahead of throughput.
Test that claim the way this page has told you to test the others. Ring the named institution and ask two questions: what do you receive, and from what date. Anyone genuinely inside the arrangement answers both without checking.
The document this page is missing
A calibration result from open water, taken by somebody who does not work for us, against parameters agreed before the vessel arrived. That is the next tier-one item, and producing it is what the first phase of a programme is for. The group publishes its own version of this page, written from the parent's side.
Sources cited on this page
- Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme — Director's note: permit received for red tide study, 2024.
- START (Solutions To Avoid Red Tide) — Mobile system to attack red tide, 2024.
- United States Patent and Trademark Office — SEABREATHER, registration 7292856, registered 30 January 2024.
- NOAA National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science — Nanobubble technology validated for remediation of harmful freshwater algal blooms, 26 September 2018.
- NOAA National Centres 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.
- NOAA Fisheries — The economic cost of harmful algal blooms, including the 2014 Lake Erie shoreline property-value figure.
- OECD — The Ocean Economy to 2050, 31 March 2025.
Bring the sceptic early
Argue with us before the season, not during it.
Give this page to whoever in your organisation is paid to be difficult, and bring them to the site read. An hour of hostile questions now is the cheapest thing either of us will buy all year.