What we can prove, and what we cannot.

Environmental technology has a credibility problem it earned. The category is full of numbers with no denominator, pilots that never published, and percentages that turn out to be from a tank in a car park.

What follows is our position on our own evidence, organised the way a technical reviewer would want it: mechanism, comparable validation, our own field record, and the parts that are genuinely unresolved.

1. The mechanism is established

Nanobubbles are a real and characterised class of object, not a marketing coinage. Gas-filled bubbles below roughly 1,000 nm behave differently from ordinary bubbles: high stability and long lifetime, negative surface charge, very high specific surface area, and enhanced gas–liquid mass transfer. Oxygen nanobubbles in water have been measured at zeta potentials of about −34 to −45 mV, which is the property that keeps them from coalescing.

The performance consequence has been measured directly. Work published in Science of the Total Environment on nanobubble aeration and biofilm growth found the gas–liquid mass transfer coefficient rose approximately elevenfold against conventional bubbles for the same delivered gas volume.

Nothing about that is contested, and nothing about it is ours. It is the physics we build on.

2. Comparable systems have been validated by NOAA

NOAA's National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science validated an ozone nanobubble aeration system on an eight-acre pond near Fort Myers Beach, Florida in 2018, reporting complete elimination of algae within 48 hours, with proper reoxygenation and no apparent harm to aquatic life.

In 2020, NCCOS-affiliated testing under a cooperative agreement evaluated a commercial nanobubble ozone system for ballast water and found it highly effective against algae, bacteria and motile zooplankton, with no statistically significant adverse residual-toxicity effect on organisms in the receiving water.

3. There is a research agreement with NOAA, and it is not an endorsement

Alarivean holds a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NOAA. Searching for the document will not turn it up. CRADAs are private instruments between an agency and a partner and are not published, so an empty search result is the mechanism working normally rather than a hole in the record.

The work carried out under it with NOAA scientist Dr Peter Moeller established something specific about inorganic toxins: the treatment sterilises them by disabling the functional groups that make them toxic, rather than by dropping them out of the water as a precipitate. Anyone who has ever had to answer the question "so where did the contaminant end up" will see why that distinction is the interesting part.

Now the sentence a reviewer should hold us to. A research agreement is a research agreement. NOAA does not endorse commercial products, this is not an endorsement, and nothing anywhere in this network should be read as though a federal agency has put its name behind a boat. We state the CRADA because it is ours to state, on our own account, and we would rather write that line ourselves than have somebody else write it about us.

4. Our own field record is a permit, not a portfolio

In September 2024 Alarivean, Inc. of Scottsdale, Arizona received Florida Department of Environmental Protection permit FLOA00062, issued by FDEP's South District Office under Chapter 403 of the Florida Statutes with a five-year window, to field-test an ozonated-seawater craft producing 1,000–2,000 gallons per minute for red tide mitigation. The trial is conditioned on active Karenia brevis above 100,000 cells per litre.

Two outside bodies wrote it up independently: the Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme, which gave the application technical support and deliberately no financial support, and the Florida nonprofit START. The estuary programme's public position is that efficacy in open water has not been demonstrated.

It has not. And the reason that sentence is worth reading twice is that it was written by a body that wants to be holding the instruments next time.

The technical support without the money is the whole point of the arrangement. An estuary programme that has taken no funding from us can publish whatever the water says. Theirs is a position about who collects the evidence — they want the open-water record on this service to be theirs, so that anything eventually said about it past the mouth of the bay rests on readings they took. We want that arrangement for the identical reason. Nobody has published data either way yet, and producing some is what the next phase is for.

5. What is unresolved

Three things, stated plainly.

Radical chemistry. Whether nanobubbles themselves generate hydroxyl radicals is an open scientific argument. A 2020 Moleaer and Arizona State University study said yes. A controlled 2023 study by Chae and colleagues in ACS ES&T Engineering found generation was minimal, if it occurred at all, at ambient conditions. We do not build the case on it.

Bromate. Ozonating bromide-rich seawater can form bromate. The controls are known — ozone concentration, contact time, pH, temperature — and the trade-off against disinfection efficiency is real. This is an operating parameter with a monitoring obligation, not a solved problem to be waved past.

Open-water scale. The published validations of this class of technology are pond-scale and ballast-tank-scale. Extending an oxidation and oxygenation duty into open coastal water with tide, wind and dilution is a genuinely different engineering problem. That is what the calibration phase of a programme exists to establish, on the client's own water, before capacity is committed.

6. How we handle numbers

Every figure on this site carries a source you can open. Where a source is secondary, regional reporting rather than a primary agency document, we mark it as indicative. Where estimates in the literature diverge — global coral reef ecosystem value, for instance, ranges across nearly two orders of magnitude depending on method — we do not pick the flattering one and print it as a headline.

Claims about what this platform will do on a specific water body are made after the site read, in writing, with the assumptions attached. Not before.