DIC, Sapphire Energy enter licensing agreement for algae-to-energy production

Sapphire Energy and Earthrise Nutritionals, a wholly owned subsidiary of DIC have entered into a nonexclusive licensing agreement to incorporate Earthrise’s algae strains with Sapphire’s algae inventory to produce green crude oil.

Sapphire Energy, as per the agreement, will integrate Earthrise Nutritionals’ Spirulina algae strain to its inventory of cyanobacteria and algae strains to produce energy from algae which is also known as green crude.

Earthrise’s prokaryotic strain will be used with Sapphire Energy’s prokaryotic and eukaryotic strains to increase the range of strain choices to produce green crude oil.

Green Crude can be refined into diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline replacing petroleum-based crude oil.

Sapphire Energy’s green crude farm called the Integrated Algal BioRefinery (IABR) which is funded both by private investment and government support is a commercial demonstration scale facility.

IABR is an entire value chain of algae-based fuel facility where right from algae cultivation to production to extraction of green crude ready to be refined takes place.

DIC through Earthrise will extend its expertise in the outdoor mass-cultivation of Spirulina to support and participate in R&D aimed at the commercialisation of algae biofuels.

Sapphire Energy uses open ponds to produce green crude oil while Earthrise has an 180,000-m2 Spirulina farm for the mass cultivation of algae in outdoor raceway ponds.

US based Sapphire Energy is an algae-based crude oil production company and Earthrise is a manufacturer of edible algae Spirulina.