Sapphire Energy

Sapphire Energy is a San Diego-based American energy company that produces crude oil made from algae.

Sapphire Energy was founded in 2007.

As of February 2014, Sapphire Energy employs over 150 employees. The company is headquartered in San Diego, Calif., and has an engineering office in Orange County, Calif. and a Research and Development facility in Las Cruces, NM. In addition, the company’s Green Crude Farm, the world’s first commercial demonstration algae-to-energy facility (also known as the Integrated Algal BioRefinery or IABR), for which construction began in June 2011, is now operating in Luna Country, near Columbus, New Mexico. Sapphire’s Green Crude Farm integrates the entire value chain of algae-based fuel, from cultivation, to harvest, to conversion of ready-to-refine Green Crude, representing the convergence of biotechnology, agriculture, and energy. The Farm is now producing barrels of crude oil year-round, and the company expects to be producing 100 barrels of Green Crude per day in 2015, and at commercial scale production in 2018.

Sapphire Energy’s business partnerships consist of many corporate luminaries in research, agriculture and engineering. In March 2011, Sapphire Energy and Monsanto announced a multi-year collaboration on algae-based research projects. In May 2011, the company announced a multi-year agreement with The Linde Group to co-develop a low-cost system to deliver CO2 to commercial-scale, open-pond, algae-to-fuel cultivation systems, now underway at the Green Crude Farm. Later, in July 2013, the companies expanded their partnership with plans to refine and commercialize a new industrial scale hydrothermal treatment technology to upgrade algae biomass to crude oil that they intend to license and market to various industries, including algae, municipal solid waste, and farm waste, for converting other biomass sources into energy. In February 2012, Sapphire Energy announced that it will integrate Earthrise Nutritionals’ spirulina strain into its growing inventory of cyanobacteria and algae strains to expand resources for algae-to-energy production. In November 2012, the company announced a partnership with Institute for Systems Biology to further the scientific research and development of algae biofuels.

In 2013, Sapphire Energy expanded its partner network to include business agreements with industry leading oil & gas refiners. In March 2013, Sapphire Energy announced a commercial agreement with Tesoro Refining and Marketing Company, LLC. Per the agreement, Tesoro will purchase crude oil from Sapphire Energy’s Green Crude Farm for processing into fuel at its west coast refineries. In December 2013, Sapphire Energy and Phillips 66 announced they will work together to analyze and confirm that Green Crude can be refined in traditional refineries, and that it meets all Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) certification requirements under the Clean Air Act. The companies will work to complete the EPA certification process to register a new fuel product entering the market.