8-17 IAN Sapphire Energy

 Sapphire Energy is a San Diego-based company that has, written on its website in bold letters, That time is now to decrease our  dependence on foreign oil.  Sapphire is leading the new industrial category of green crude production, profoundly altering the petrochemical landscape for the better. Those are big words with profound implications. But how realistic is that claim? I will let Tim Zenk, Vice President of Corporate Affairs, answer that question. “Sapphire energy was founded in 2007 with the idea that there had to be a better way to make more hydrocarbons on the planet. We went about the business of looking at it from a biological standpoint thinking that there had to be in intersection between agriculture, energy and biotechnology. We looked at a number of plants and organisms that we thought could be the key to raising and developing more energy and we came across a lot of work on algae, algae being the most photosynthetic plant on earth, producing 99.9% of all of the worlds crude oil today, that is the growth of algae did 500 million years ago. We went about the business of seeing if we could commercialize it. The story of Sapphire is a company that developed the ability to take algae and turn it into a  large commercial scale crop.

 By the way, this company is not small potatoes. They are aligned with many big companies including one which may ring a bell, Monsanto.