III. B.5.a. Facility Design and Construction.

After the above noted projects carried out in California, the ASP decided to hold a competition for the development of a larger process development outdoor test facility (OTF) located in the southwestern United States. Two independent designs and proposals were commissioned, one consisting of enclosed production units (Aquasearch, Inc., Dr. Mark Huntley, Principal Investigator); the other of open ponds, similar to the design tested in California (Microbial Products, Inc., J. C. Weissman, Principal Investigator). Microbial Products, Inc., won this competition, with a proposed facility consisting of two 1,000-m2 ponds, one plastic lined and another unlined, as well as supporting R&D using six small, 3-m2 ponds, continuing and extending the work carried out in the prior projects in California (Weissman and Goebel 1987. See Section III. D. for a discussion of this engineering /cost analysis. No report for the Aquasearch proposal is available.).

Although the proposal recommended establishing this facility in Southern California, the ASP selected a site in Roswell, New Mexico to establish the OTF. The project was located at an abandoned water research facility. Roswell has high insolation, abundant available flatland and supplies of saline groundwaters. The primary limitation of this site was temperature, which, in retrospect, turned out to be too low for more than 5 months of the year for the more productive species identified during the prior project.

The objective of the first year of the research at this new site was to initiate a species screening effort at this site with the small 3-m2 ponds, which were installed while designing and constructing the larger facility. A major objective of this project was to identify cold weather — adapted strains (Weissman et al. 1987).

Building the large system required installation of two water pipelines of 1,300-m in length (15 and 7.5 cm, for brackish and fresh waters). The ponds were about 14 x 77 m, with concrete block walls and a central wooden divider. The paddle wheels were approximately 5-m wide, with a nominal mixing speed of 20 cm/s, and a maximum of 40 cm/s. Carbonation was achieved with a sump that allowed counterflow injection of CO2, to achieve high (90%+) absorption of CO2. One pond was plastic lined; the other had a crushed rock layer. The walls were cinder block. A 50-m2 inoculum production pond was included. Figure III. B.9. shows an overview of the layout of the completed facility.