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Summit View Development Corp. was incorporated in 2001
Dr. Stan Pankratz joined as co-founder of Summit View Development Crop in 2010 to assist companies with accessing benefits found within the Government of Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program.
It was his assistance to another algae company that had developed an advanced cultivation system, that led him on a personal journey focused on algae’s potential to address the Province of Alberta and Canada’s climate change challenge.
Algae is our planet’s fastest growing plant and has CO2 as it’s key nutrient requirement. His PhD studies culminated in a report to the Alberta Government on the topic “Algae-based Biomass for the Production of Fuels and Chemicals” that may be found at Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA).
It was during his studies that Dr. Pankratz realized that “the emerging algae industry has the potential to eclipse the oil and gas industry as it has been known to our generation. Anything that you can do with petroleum products can be created with algae and much more!” This would include energy, chemistries, plastics, food, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, clean air, clean water and preparation for travel in space.
As a result of his studies, the company which he now leads has expanded to include a significant focus on addressing what Dr. Pankratz believes to be the key impediment and holdback on the algae industry as a whole. There is need to drop the production cost of algae cultivation by an order of magnitude. Bring the cost of the biomass feedstock down by a factor of 10 and this industry will surge forward. This however is a non-trivial challenge. In particular if you attempt to do this in Canada.
Conventional thinking has been that microalgae cultivation can be produced most cost effectively in large open pond raceway systems located in temperate climates with an abundance of sunlight and access to water. Although this can be done in Canada, the long winters would effectively limit cultivation to the warmest 3-6 months depending on location.
Dr. Pankratz set out an extraordinarily bold challenge for Rainforest Algae Corp. to develop an environmentally controlled photobioreactor (PBR) system that would:
This project aims to scale to a commercial level of a 10m3 and to fully automate and optimize system processes from cultivation through to harvesting, drying, and storage.
The next step in scale up operations will be to design / construct a 1m3 PBR algae cultivation platform.
Increase yield
Therefore, research efforts must include emphasis on reducing the energy input costs.
