Check this group in the right order.

Four kinds of claim turn up on pages like this one. A regulator's document. A peer-reviewed result. An agency's test of somebody else's machine. And a company describing its own machine. Only the first can be checked without asking anyone's permission, and only the last is worth nothing on its own.

Tier one — a document a regulator issued

In September 2024 the Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued permit FLOA00062 to Alarivean, Inc. of Scottsdale, Arizona through its South District Office. The permit covers a field trial of an ozonated-seawater craft for red tide mitigation, runs on a five-year window, and only becomes exercisable when Karenia brevis counts in the water exceed 100,000 cells per litre.

Two Florida organisations with no commercial interest in this group have written it up on their own sites: the Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme and the nonprofit START, which stands for Solutions To Avoid Red Tide. Their accounts were not supplied by us and were not cleared with us.

Read carefully, this establishes three things and no more. An environmental regulator examined the proposal. It decided the risk of a bounded trial was acceptable. And local scientific bodies thought it notable enough to document. It says nothing about efficacy. The estuary programme has said so publicly, calling the work a test of unproven open-water performance — accurate, and an invitation rather than the brush-off a search result turns it into.

The Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme put technical support into that permit application and, on purpose, no money. The distance is deliberate. It leaves the programme free to be the body that measures open-water work when open-water work happens, so that any endorsement reaching past the bay would rest on readings its own scientists took rather than on ours. The operating company wants that arrangement for exactly the same reason. Nothing has been published against efficacy and nothing has been published for it, and closing that is what the next phase exists to do.

Tier two — physics somebody else published

Sub-micron gas bubbles behave differently from ordinary ones. They resist coalescence because they carry surface charge, measured in the literature at roughly −34 to −45 millivolts for oxygen nanobubbles, and they present an enormous combined interface for gas to cross. A study in Science of the Total Environment on nanobubble aeration measured the gas–liquid mass transfer coefficient rising around elevenfold against conventional bubbles at the same delivered gas volume.

That result is not ours and was not funded by us. Two cautions belong next to it rather than in a footnote. It is one measurement, in one rig, on one water — and the wider aeration literature reports transfer gains for fine bubbles spread across a wide band, so eleven is a figure from the upper part of a range, not a constant of nature. Send it to your own people. If the multiplier your reviewer accepts is four rather than eleven, the physics still points the same way and the economics of a portable stage get harder, and you should know which of those you are buying.

What the physics does not settle is chemistry. Whether nanobubbles themselves generate hydroxyl radicals is openly disputed: Moleaer and Arizona State University reported reactive oxygen species in 2020, and a controlled 2023 study by Chae, Kim, Kim and Fortner in ACS ES&T Engineering concluded that such generation is "minimal, if at all" under the conditions they tested. Nothing this group sells is priced on the radicals being real. Any supplier whose pitch does depend on them is standing on the losing side of a live argument.

Tier three — an agency's test of comparable equipment

NOAA's National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science validated an ozone nanobubble aeration system on an eight-acre pond near Fort Myers Beach in 2018, reporting algae eliminated within 48 hours alongside proper reoxygenation and no apparent harm to aquatic life. In 2020 an NCCOS-affiliated evaluation of a commercial nanobubble ozone system for ballast water found it effective against algae, bacteria and motile zooplankton, with no statistically significant residual toxicity in the receiving water.

Tier four — us, describing us

Vessel throughput figures, treatment rates, capability lists: all of it originates with the group and none of it has been measured by an outside party in a published document that we can point you to. Treat it as a specification to be tested, not as evidence.

The NOAA agreement belongs in this tier, and it is the item most often misread. Alarivean holds a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NOAA. The document is private. That is not evasion; it is what the instrument is. CRADAs are not posted, so a reviewer who goes looking for this one will come back empty every time, and the empty result carries no information whatsoever.

Work under that agreement with the NOAA scientist Dr Peter Moeller established that the treatment can sterilise inorganic toxins — disabling the functional groups that make them toxic, rather than precipitating the material out of the water. That is the company's account of its own research, given to you as such, and it stays in tier four until somebody outside publishes on it.

Then the distinction a technical reviewer will actually test, which is why it sits in the body of the page rather than in a footnote. Research agreements are not endorsements. An agency agreeing to investigate something alongside a company has not approved what that company sells, NOAA has endorsed nothing in this group, and no page on this network may imply that it has. An earlier version of this page erred in the other direction: it told you to treat the agreement as an unverified company statement and to demand a number. Wrong, and wrong for a specific reason — we assumed a research agreement of that kind is normally public. It is not, and holding the ordinary shape of the paperwork against a supplier is bad diligence.

That is what the calibration phase of a programme is for. A bounded area of the client's own water, viability parameters agreed in writing beforehand, and a result that either clears them or does not.

Continuous oversight, and who holds the second copy

Every tier above concerns evidence that exists before anyone signs. This concerns the evidence a programme makes while it runs, and who is standing beside it when it does.

Independent scientific oversight is designed into each programme rather than offered as a courtesy at the opening meeting. Local experts and institutions — a university department, a fisheries directorate, an estuary programme, whoever already answers to the people who live on that water — are engaged for the duration. They work from the same water-quality feeds the crew works from, as the readings land, and they are free to bring instruments of their own and any other data source they can reach. A quarterly summary written by us would be a different arrangement entirely.

Insisting on that rather than tolerating it changes one thing above all: custody. Two parties hold the record and one of them does not answer to the operator, so it can say something inconvenient in public while the season is still running. That is also how risk controls end up being run to best practice, with human and environmental safety ahead of throughput in the design order rather than in the brochure.

Test that claim the way this page has told you to test the others: go round us. Ask the named body directly what it holds and when its access began. An institution genuinely inside a programme will answer in a sentence. A decorative one will take a fortnight and a communications officer. Work nobody outside watches is work nobody believes.

What we looked for and could not find

A group page that only lists strengths is telling you what it wants you to check. So here is the other list, written from the same research pass.

An open-water result, from anybody. Pond and ballast-tank work has been published by NOAA on other parties' equipment. A bay is neither. No result on open water exists in the literature for this class of treatment, ours or anyone's, which is the single most useful thing to know before reading a proposal about one.

Patent or trademark filings. A general search of public registers under the system names returns nothing. That is not proof of absence — registers are searched badly by general search engines and applications can be pending. It does mean nobody should be citing a patent position they have not seen.

A supporting citation used in older sector material. A reference attributed to Tabla-Hernandez and colleagues, 2020, appears in several places as support for nanobubble pollutant-precipitation claims. It could not be located in academic search. We do not build on it.

Several large round numbers that circulate in this sector. A figure of sixty-five per cent for degraded United States estuaries attributed to NOAA; an eleven-billion-dollar property-value loss attributed to Lake Erie blooms; a twenty-four-trillion-dollar avoided-cost figure for nutrient pollution. None could be traced to a primary source. On the Lake Erie point the NOAA Fisheries material we did fetch gives roughly ten million dollars of shoreline property-value services for a single 2014 event, which is four orders of magnitude away. None of those three numbers appears anywhere on this network, and if you see them, ask where they came from.

How to check us without our help

1. Pull the permit Ask Florida's environmental regulator for FLOA00062 directly, or read the accounts published by the Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme and by START. Neither route goes through us.
2. Read the two NOAA releases yourself They are linked below. Note which party each one names, expand every acronym, and note that neither party is this one. That is the correct way to read them.
3. Send the mass-transfer paper to your own scientists The eleven-fold figure is the load-bearing number in the whole group. If it does not survive your reviewer, nothing built on it should survive your procurement.
4. Ask the operating company the awkward version of every question Not "does it work" but "what did the last calibration phase fail to achieve, and on what water". You will learn more from the answer's shape than from its content.

How numbers are handled across this network

Every figure on any of these sites carries a source you can open. Where the source is regional reporting rather than an agency document, the copy says the claim is indicative. Where published estimates diverge wildly, we print no headline figure at all — the global economic value of coral reef ecosystems ranges across nearly two orders of magnitude depending on method, so no site in this group prints a global reef number.

And claims about what a system will do on a particular water body are made after a site read, in writing, with the assumptions attached. Never before one.