The A.I.M. Interview: Martin Sabarsky, Cellana's CEO

by David Schwartz (Algae Industry Magazine) Martin Sabarsky was promoted to President and CEO of Kona, Hawaii-based Cellana in April of 2011. He now has the challenging and, if all goes well, rewarding job of escorting Cellana into commercial operation. This comes in the wake of a recently concluded three-year partnership with Shell Oil that resulted in the development of an algal production demonstration facility as the centerpiece of a nearly $100 million total investment to date.

...His experience taking Diversa public gave Martin a chance to learn about the power of industrial biotechnology to transform the world and manufacturing processes. “It was very exciting,” he remembers. “I’d originally been attracted to the life sciences industry more for the pharmaceutical applications, mainly because I wanted to be able to do good and do well at the same time, and there aren’t that many opportunities in work, or in life, to be able to do that simultaneously.”

...Our technologies were built in Hawaii. The company’s scientific co-founders had optimized, and then patented, a hybrid way of growing algae at large scale. They figured out a way to do batch production, but on a continuous basis so that open pond contamination no longer was an issue.

...Contamination comes from two sources—other strains of algae that will find their way into the ponds and, worse than that, little pests like rotifers coming in and clearing the pond entirely. In the first case, over time you don’t have a monoculture anymore. You don’t have the strain that you want to produce, though you can still have biomass. In the second case you’ve got nothing and you have to start over.

...What the joint venture with Shell helped us to do was validate the technology at demonstration scale. Over the course of the three years of the joint venture, we built the world class, state-of-the-art, six-acre facility in Kona, across the street from the pilot facility. This was a build-to-suit facility, so it was even more optimal than the pilot facility that we had leased prior to the construction and operation of the demo facility.

...What we’re looking to do is to produce a portfolio of products—renewable fuels, renewable chemicals and sustainable feed.

...When I think about other algae companies that are in our space I want to know are they at 10 (gm/m2/day) or are they closer to 30? And what’s their oil content? Does the amino acid profile look like it lines up for the proteins for feed? READ MORE