The Sarasota Bay Estuary Program (SBEP) in a partnership with Alarivean, Inc of Scottsdale, Arizona has received a permit from the FDEP for a field trial in Sarasota Bay to test a mobile system that injects nano oxygen and ozone into the water column that will attack red tide.
The use of ozone as a potential mitigation approach to controlling red tide goes back nearly 50 years when researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory in Milford, Connecticut used ozone to treat seawater during a red tide bloom in Tampa Bay. Extracts from the seawater with red tide were injected into laboratory mice, all of which died within a few minutes. In contrast, when the red tide water samples were treated with ozone and injected into mice, all of them lived. The test showed that treating a red tide-infected water mass with ozone deactivated the toxin that the red tide organism produces. Other uses of ozone to sterilize seawater contaminated with human pathogens go back as far as 1929 and in the early 1980s researchers looked at ozone as a more environmentally friendly approach than chlorinated compounds to reduce biofouling in pipes at power plants.
If that’s all true, why hasn’t this approach been used since then during the many red tides that have invaded the Suncoast? The problem is scale. A red tide bloom covers a large area that would not be appreciably reduced with spot applications in just a few places. That’s where Alarivean comes in. They contact the SBEP about a year go with a proposed project that could potentially create ozonated seawater at rates of 1,000 to 2,000 per minute (gpm) with a mobile platform. That’s a lot of ozonated seawater produced in a short timescale.
The mobile platform is a specially modified SeaDoo jet ski with a closed cooling system so it won’t clog or jam from riding through the high viscosity of the “thick” water in a red tide bloom. Knowing the history of ozone in cleaning up seawater and intrigued with Alarivean’s mobile technology, Dave Tomasko, Executive Director of the SBEP, agreed to partner with them on a permit application. With the FDEP’s approval, the SBEP will be able to test the procedure along with a control measure in the open waters of Sarasota Bay.
While he is hopeful that the “Magic Jet Ski” will prove to be a major mitigation tool to control red tide, Dave emphasizes that the procedure is a test program and we’ll have to wait and see if it can make a difference in an open water environment.
To get more details about the ozone test program in the SBEP’s press release, contact Dave Tomasko at dave@sarasotabay.org.