United invests $5M in Viridos

In Illinois, United wants to turn microalgae into SAF through the first new investment of its recently announced UAV Sustainable Flight FundSM since its launch: algae biofuel company Viridos. This $5 million investment will support the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) made from algae, an abundant and scalable resource that can be grown and harvested without impacting the food supply chain.

Viridos’ bioengineering technology combines several important and unique attributes contributing to better scalability and sustainability compared with traditional jet fuel production:

·      Surface area oil productivities of Viridos algae far exceed any traditional oil crop, achieving high algae oil output on comparatively small areas.

·      Viridos algae are grown in vessels containing seawater. This allows contained deployment in hot and dry locations without taxing scarce freshwater and arable land resources, while eliminating runoff.

·      Viridos algae have extremely high oil contents facilitating downstream processing to algae oil.

·      Viridos algae oil is a quality plant oil allowing existing bio-refineries to process the oil with high yield.