Harmful algal blooms · Organic toxins
A bloom does not wait for a procurement cycle. HABslayer is the treatment stage that goes to the water — into the bloom, at depth, in the days when the decision still changes the outcome.
The argument
Everyone agrees the fix is upstream. Reduce the nutrient load, mend the catchment, hold the sewage and the fertiliser back from the river, and blooms get rarer. That is true, it is the right long fight, and it is measured in decades.
The Baltic is the cautionary case, and its numbers are worth reading slowly. HELCOM's own indicator puts normalised nitrogen input down 11 per cent and phosphorus down 32 per cent against the 1997–2003 reference period. Decades of coordinated international effort, genuine reductions — and the Baltic Proper and the Gulf of Finland still fail their maximum allowable input for both nutrients.
The hypoxic area there has gone the other way over the same period, from under 10,000 square kilometres before 1950 to more than 60,000 since 2000. Catchment work is necessary. It is also the slowest lever anybody has.
A bloom arriving at an intake in July does not care what year the nutrient policy lands. It closes the beach, throttles the plant, kills the pen stock and empties the hotel — and it does that in a fortnight, on a coastline that has to keep operating.
HABslayer exists for that fortnight. It is not a substitute for the upstream work and we will not sell it as one. It is what keeps the season, the harvest and the water supply intact while the upstream work is legislated, funded and built.
Two modes, one hull
Cell counts are up, the water has changed colour, and somebody has already made the phone call. Vessels work the affected water: characterise, dose, deliver at depth, verify, repeat on the next pass as the patch moves with wind and tide.
This is the mode every operator understands, because it maps onto the emergency they already have a name for.
Imagery and sampling flag a patch forming in the next stretch of water. A vessel goes and works it there, while it is still small and shallow and nobody has written a press line about it.
Deep Strikes on adjacent water sit inside the base Aquatic Prosperity subscription. Deliberately: the bloom that never arrives is the cheapest one we will ever treat, and the most valuable one you will ever buy.
Pay a supplier by the incident and you have paid them to hope for a bad summer. That incentive has no business inside a public water contract.
How it is sold instead
Capacity is reserved for your water, for the weeks you need it, gases and augments carried by us. An intercepted bloom and a full-blown one cost you the same.
The stage itself
HABslayer is the advanced oxidation mode of Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology. Cut a bubble small enough and it stops leaving; published aeration work put the coefficient that governs gas crossing into water at roughly eleven times its conventional value for the same gas volume.
That ratio is the reason a boat-sized gas budget is worth carrying to a bay-sized problem at all. Without it you would need a pipeline.
The oxidant half is where a serious buyer asks the harder question, and they should. Ozone in bromide-rich Gulf water will make bromate if nobody caps it. So it is capped — concentration, contact time and pH written to a site limit before the vessel sails and watched in the water while it works.
Reassurances
A fisheries directorate, an environment ministry and a water utility all arrive at the first meeting with the same four worries. Better to answer them here than to be asked in front of a board.
Who calls, and why
A bloom is one event, but it lands on each of these as a different kind of loss — and each of them has a different number of days before that loss is booked.
Membrane biofouling, throttled output, and a public conservation notice nobody wants to issue twice.
A year of feed conversion floating on the surface after one bad night. No insurance product covers it well.
Respiratory complaints on the sand, cancelled bookings, and a season priced before the bloom arrived.
Closures on shellfish beds that hold long after the water clears, because the toxin does not leave with the cells.
On the record
Adjectives are free. A permit number and an agency release can be checked by anyone who wants to spend an afternoon on it.
The first is from 2018. NOAA's coastal science centres ran an ozone nanobubble aeration system across an eight-acre Florida pond and reported the algae gone inside two days, reoxygenation holding, no visible harm to the life in it. Other people's equipment, other people's partners, a pond rather than a bay.
The second is ours and it is smaller than people assume. Florida DEP issued Alarivean, Inc. permit FLOA00062 in September 2024 to field-test an ozonated-seawater craft against red tide, with the trial gated on live Karenia brevis above 100,000 cells per litre. The Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme and the Florida nonprofit START logged it independently. The programme's stated view is that efficacy in open water has not been shown.
Which is true, and is also an invitation. Sarasota backed the application on technical grounds and took none of our money, so it is free to publish whatever the bay turns out to do. What it has asked for is to be the body gathering that open-water evidence before this service gets endorsed anywhere past its own shoreline. We would sign that tomorrow. No data exists in either direction yet; producing some is the entire purpose of the next phase.
The third document, nobody can open — you, us or a journalist. Alarivean holds a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NOAA, and work under it alongside Dr Peter Moeller established that this treatment sterilises inorganic toxins. CRADAs are private commercial instruments. They are not filed anywhere public, so a search returns nothing and always will. Read it as the company's own statement, because that is precisely what it is — and not as NOAA endorsing anything, because agencies do not do that.
None of it adds up to proof at scale. Permission to attempt something is a long way from having shown it works, and this category contains too many firms happy to blur the distance.
Elsewhere in the system family
Immediate, Significant, Scaled
Name the bay, the species if you have it, the weeks it comes back in, and what last year's bad fortnight cost across every department it touched. Alarivean answers with a read on that specific water — what a bloom programme there would change, and what it would leave untouched.
