Company aims to turn desert dunes into ‘rolling hills of wheat and maize’
▶ HyveGeo hopes its fertiliser solution will support UAE’s food security,
Aclimate technology start-up with its headquarters in the UK and operations in the UAE has plans to transform large swathes of the desert into arable land for crops such as wheat and maize.
HyveGeo, founded last year by Abdulaziz bin Redha, Dr Samsurin Welch, Eva Morales, and Dr Harjit Singh, is developing microalgae technology for carbon removal and soil regeneration.
The operation, which is largely based in the UAE, is currently at the pilot stage but it is hoped that by the end of 2025 it will be at the commercial stage, and starting to turn the desert green.
Mr bin Redha, HyveGeo’s chief executive, says the company started by exploring methods of removing carbon dioxide from the air with a view to selling carbon credits.
The original plan was to grow microalgae in a controlled way in ponds, which sequester carbon dioxide from the air. The idea evolved when the founders decided to convert microalgae into biofertilisers and biochar.
The biochar is created through pyrolysis, where microalgae is heated to between 500°C and 600°C to leave a black, charred substance. The company combined biofertiliser and biochar, along with other ingredients, to create a product that can, over time, convert the sand into soil ready for cultivation.
“As we progressed, we realised we can do a lot more with what we’re doing,” he says.
“It was no longer a carbon removal company. It became a food security company because what the biochar can do is regenerate soil, bring back soil health and turn desert land into arable farmland. This biochar is really good for the soil but you need to add a little bit of other mixtures to it.”
A portion of the microalgae is converted to biochar, and the rest is converted to bio fertiliser and biostimulants.
The biofertiliser made from the algae is then mixed with biochar before sticking them in the soil to create organic fertiliser, Mr bin Redha says. “You can fix dead soil and soil that’s desert sand and convert it to arable soil. You can have a series of sand dunes and convert that to rolling hills of wheat and maize.”
HyveGeo is now in the process of proving its findings.
The science for microalgae has been there for more than 35 years. “This is not new. But no one has put these two [biofertiliser and biochar] together,” Mr bin Redha says.
“We’re trying to do this end-to-end solution in a very cost-effective way, because all of this is very expensive, but we found a way to do it in a cost-effective way.”
Mr bin Redha says 85 per cent of the product has been proven. The last 15 per cent is about finding the right ratio for the UAE climate and its soil.
“What we’re doing today is proving that formula that we have, the mixture of biochar-microalgae with the microbes and the levels [of each]. That’s our secret sauce, basically.”
Pot trials are taking place over the next few months in Mr bin Redha’s back garden in
Jumeirah, where he is growing 100 pots each of tomato and arugula. The microalgae and biochar are created on their farm in Ras Al Khaimah, while the research and lab work is carried out in Cambridge, where all the founders went to university, and in Exeter.
“We’re testing two types of highly saline soil, dead soil from a farm where a farmer can’t grow anything.
After that, they plan to carry out field trials over two hectares – the size of two and a half football pitches.
“We’re in talks with a couple of government organisations in Abu Dhabi,” he says.
One of the fields will be to grow microalgae in ponds and the second will be for regeneration, which will take months.
“We take that mixture and we go to the second hectare and put that mixture in the sand and we start growing for six months because we want to prove it over two seasons,” Mr bin Redha says.
“The biofertiliser will be placed 30cm under the sand, along with the soil.”
In Abu Dhabi, there are 20,000 farms where the soil needs regeneration, he says. The HyveGeo product price will be about $10,000 per hectare and will need to be topped up every five years.
“There are other companies and competitors that do one part of desert greening, which is a mechanical form called liquid nanoclay and you have to spray it every single year and each hectare costs you $20,000. Smallholder farmers can’t afford that.”
HyveGeo is also developing the biostimulants that will be produced from the microalgae that will enable the land to be used for crops.
The start-up has raised $200,000 from venture capital funding and an undisclosed government grant from the Majra CSR fund, through Abdulla bin Touq, the Minister of Economy.
“I met him [the minister] a year ago with this idea and he was amazing, and his whole team and the ministry and the Majra team gave us fantastic support, inviting us on delegations and trips to showcase what we’re doing. We were the first private sector funding they gave,” he says.
The next stage of fund-raising will be $3 million to $5 million, he says, which will take the company to the end of 2025, mid-2026.
“This fundraise will conclude our pilot in the UAE and gets us to commercialisation,” Mr bin Redha says.
“That’s when we have IP [intellectual property] and that’s when we will have what we call a ‘lift and shift’ approach, which is something that’s working. It’s about economies of scale then and it becomes a question of bringing the cost down.
“Just like solar, just like wind when it first started, it’s just following the cost curve and bringing that cost down. The more you have, the more you created over more years commodity advances, the lower the cost.”
Securing the necessary land will be important to getting that cost down and he is hoping that whoever supplies it will offer a grace period and help them reach their true commercial potential.
“I’m going to need over 100 square kilometres of land just for algae cultivation to do it at scale over the next 10 years to reach one megaton scale,” Mr bin Redha says. He suggests an area in Al Dhafra might be ideal as they can help with the carbon dioxide being produced by factories there and feed it into the algae ponds.
At one megatonne capacity of algae production, Mr bin Redha says HyveGeo can regenerate about 12,000 hectares of desert a year – equal to 120 square kilometres a year, or double the size of Jebel Ali Freezone.