Aquatic Remediation Vessels
A treatment plant that can reach the water that needs it.
Fixed plant treats whatever is piped to it. A bay will not be piped anywhere. So the plant goes to sea, and every constraint on this page follows from that one decision.
ARV is our own designation, not a class any registry recognises. It describes a working boat whose payload happens to be gas handling and oxidation rather than cargo, nets or survey equipment.
The physics of why the treatment works belongs to the platform, and SeaBreather sets it out properly. What follows is the operator's half of it: what sits on the deck, what constrains which hull can work which water, and which numbers on this page are ours rather than somebody else's.
The deck, item by item
Six things, and none of them is exotic on its own. The engineering is in getting all six onto a hull that can still hold station in a two-metre sea.
- Gas storage and generation Oxygen carried aboard, and ozone generated from it on demand rather than stored. Blends are made up for the duty: straight oxygen for a hypoxic column, an oxidant fraction where there is organic material to break down.
- The generation stage Where gas is sheared into the sub-micron range in line with the flow. This is the step that decides whether the oxygen ends up dissolved or above the vessel as a wasted plume, and it is why bubble size gets so much attention on the technical pages.
- The delivery array Charged water returned into the layer that lost its oxygen. On a stratified estuary in August, that means below the thermocline. Surface treatment on a capped water column is a photograph, not a result.
- The instrument set Profiling through depth for dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, pH and turbidity, plus a sampling point before and after the treated volume. Read before dosing, read after, at the same depths.
- The log Position, time, gas, concentration, contact time, and what the water did. Written as it happens, not reconstructed. An inspector will eventually read this rather than any of our documents, so it is treated as the product.
- Endurance Fuel, gas, crew hours and hull time. The binding one is almost always gas, which is why replenishment is designed into the zone before the first pass.
What decides the tier
Vessels come in three tiers — Nimble, Standard and Mega. Which one suits a zone is settled by physical constraints long before anybody discusses budget, and the constraints usually disagree with each other.
| Constraint | What it settles |
|---|---|
| Draught over the shallowest working ground | The hard ceiling, and the one that usually decides it. |
| Transit time from a usable berth | How much of a working day is treatment and how much is passage. |
| Gas endurance between replenishments | Whether a hull works to a schedule or to a supply chain. |
| Deck area and power | How much generation and oxidation capacity physically fits. |
| Sea state and crew rotation | How many days of a contracted season are genuinely workable. |
Two of those deserve expanding. Shallow ground beats every other consideration on the list — a reef flat or a lagoon entrance rules out a bigger hull whatever the budget says, and a far corner of a zone first reached at noon is a corner that gets treated badly for the rest of the season. Gas is the other one. Past a certain zone size it stops being a question of fitting a larger tank and becomes a question of bringing a second hull, which is the next section.
Which tier suits which kind of water is tabulated on the platform's own site. This table is the other half of that question: what stops a tier from working a zone even when the water looks right for it.
Super SeaBreather
Past a certain zone size, the second hull is gas.
A vessel that has to break off and steam to a replenishment berth is a vessel not treating anything for the duration. On a small zone that is an inconvenience. On a national programme it is the difference between a fleet and a rota.
The Super SeaBreather configuration answers it by pairing a working hull with a dedicated gas barge, so replenishment happens alongside, in the zone, at the pace the treatment actually consumes. It is also the point at which an industrial gas partner stops being a supplier and becomes a party to the venture.
This is a configuration we deploy, not a separate vessel class. The treatment stage aboard is the same one described on the treatment page.
The honest inventory
One photograph of a real hull, and two renders.
The image at the top of this page is a vessel that exists and has been in water. The two composites elsewhere on this site are visualisations of a configuration, produced to show an arrangement rather than to record an event.
Why it is worth labelling
Every supplier in this sector has renders. Most sites mix them with photographs and let the reader sort it out, which works until a technical reviewer asks where a particular image was taken and nobody can answer.
So each one here carries a caption saying which it is. It costs nothing and it removes an entire category of awkward conversation later.
What a photograph does not prove
A hull under way proves a hull under way. It says nothing about how many hours it has worked, in what water, against what result, or whether a fleet of them could be held on your coast next August.
Those are contract questions, and they get answered against your dates in the site read.
Numbers, and where they came from
Two flow figures, and only one of them has been outside this company.
This is the part of the old vessel page that needed rewriting most.
Our own material quotes 4,000 and 2,000 gallons per minute of treated water for the two larger hull configurations. Those are our figures. No independent test report, no regulatory filing and no third-party measurement of them has been published, and until one has, they are a specification to be demonstrated on your water in a calibration phase rather than a result to be cited at you.
A separate and smaller number does have an outside record behind it. Florida's Department of Environmental Protection issued us permit FLOA00062 in September 2024 for a red tide mitigation field trial, using a modified personal watercraft producing ozonated seawater at 1,000 to 2,000 gallons per minute. That is a different and much smaller craft than a SeaBreather, and two Florida bodies with no commercial interest in us — the Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme and the nonprofit START — wrote it up independently.
Putting the two side by side is the point. One has a regulator and two outside bodies attached to it. The other has us. The evidence page sorts the whole record that way.
Asked by harbourmasters and naval architects
Four about the hull
What does ARV stand for?
Aquatic Remediation Vessel. Ours, not a registry class.
It is shorthand for a working boat carrying a treatment plant as payload. Flag, survey and manning follow the ordinary rules for a vessel of that size in that water, and no part of this arrangement asks a maritime authority to invent a category.
Has anyone independently measured the treatment flow rate?
No, and we will not write as though they had. The 4,000 and 2,000 gallons per minute in our material are company figures with no published external measurement behind them.
They belong in a calibration phase, where the parameters are agreed in writing beforehand and a disappointing answer is a legitimate outcome rather than an argument.
Is SeaBreather a registered trademark?
Yes — United States registration 7292856, filed in May 2022 and registered in January 2024, covering water-treatment aeration vessels supplied as boat components and environmental remediation services for water, air and waste.
The register is public, so this one you can check rather than take from us.
Record: USPTO TSDR, serial 97424589
How many hulls are in service?
Fewer than a page of vessel photography would lead you to assume, which is why the images here are captioned the way they are.
Availability on your coast, for your season, is a real question with a real answer, and it belongs in the site read where it can be checked against your dates.
The duties this hull carries
Draught, distance, season
Send us a chart and a month.
Bathymetry, the nearest working berth and the weeks you need covered are enough to say which tier a zone would take, and whether the honest answer is that it would take none of them.