As far as I'm aware, (as of 10/23/2008) SCIPIO Biofuels Inc. is the only company with a continuous, size-selective microalgae harvester. When we figured out the secret, we created 4 more significantly different designs to cover the entire range of sizes of microalgae. SCIPIO Biofuels Inc. also has multiple, fully sealed and temperature controlled PBR's for different applications as well as all latitudes from the Equator to aprox. 43 deg. north latitude. This assumes our math is correct, I say this because I don't claim to know much about the math behind planetary interactions as they would relate to the angle of incidence of Sunlight on the northern hemisphere.
We're still small because government funding is a circus, VC's have consistently proven themselves to be a greedy, unethical and insulting freak-show. The price of admission is way too high. We shouldn't have to give away the lion's share of literally everything we've got including our competitive advantage in exchange for a snotty egotist who uses money as a weapon. That's unethical and we won't do it. The advantage to having trouble finding BIG capital is that we are spending our time refining the details. Not building only a part of a system we hope will work (but don't really care about), with someone else's money, like most other algae-to-biofuel companies.
SCIPIO Biofuels Inc. has all of the relevant technologies to make a go of it on a commercial scale, here, now, today. Because stewardship is the key to the success of the biofuels industry, we're unwilling to sacrifice our vision of how algae-to-biofuels should and truly can be done. We laugh at quick-buck artists and the multitudes who have tried to rob us with a pen. When the world gets bad enough, our phone will ring and we'll demonstrate how biofuels could have been done years ago if greed hadn't gotten in the way of the VC's capacity for rational thought.
