Cyanotech: Cultivating Miracles of Microalgae

I'm Gerry Cysewski. I'm the founder of Cyanotech back in 1983. Well, what initially attracted us to HOST Park was the, the natural resources that they had, either the sunlight, the cold water, low rainfall, warm climate. Also, it's under a blanket permit, so we could very quickly start construction and leading to production so we could move very fast from the planning stage into the production stage. When we first started, we didn't have a lot of physical resources, and they provided some of those physical resources to help us move ahead.

They been very supportive of us. They really do work with the clients and are very supportive in the state government to make sure clients can succeed as best they can. Well, when we came here in 1984, prior to that, we actually surveyed every warm state in the United States. We are originally based in the Seattle area. When we came here, it is the ideal spot to grow microalgae. It gets more sunlight than any other coastal location in the United States. It's warm 12 months a year, so it can produce 12 months a year. It only gets very low rainfall only about 12 inches a year, so it can produce in open ponds. And then we have access to this very unique resource, cold deep seawater pumped up from a depth of 2000 feet. We use that cold seawater in our process, cooling very economic way to cool process streams. We use it to air condition our buildings, and we use it to control the temperature in some of our ponds during the height of summer. For instance, this building right now is air conditioned with cold sea water and the total cost for that deep sea water to air condition. This building is about $30 a month.

Cyanotech is a microalgae company. All of our products and technology are based on microalgae. We currently are selling primarily into the nutritional supplement industry, and we're selling two main products, Spirulina, which is a whole microalgae, nutritional supplement, very rich in,  antioxidants like beta carotene, we also produce Haematococcus and extract from it a natural pigment called astaxanthin. And astaxanthin is the most potent known natural antioxidant in nature. Well, some of the unique technology we've developed here, one of them with our spirulina culture, we developed an open pond system that allows us to continuously produce spirulina. We can produce it year round and we recycle a hundred percent of our culture media. And this, I don't think any other spirulina farm in the world has been able to do.

We also produce have very unique technology to produce Haematococcus for the astaxanthin production, but we're really recognized as one of the largest algae producers in the world. I think. I hope that Cyanotech's lasting vision will be producing high quality products that benefit people's health throughout the world.