Since winning Innovacorp’s CleanTech Open in April, Mather Carscallen’s SABRTech has landed $250,000 in funding and is working toward opening a pilot scale plant, hopefully in Nova Scotia in 2014.

SABRTech came to public notice in the spring when its revolutionary technology for reducing the cost of producing fuel from algae won first place at the $300,000 CleanTech Open. Innovacorp launched the contest to find a cleantech company anywhere in the world that would set up in Nova Scotia. After scouring the globe, they found the winner at Dalhousie University, where Carscallen was working on a PhD.

“We’ve been building and ramping up and we hit the ground running as much as we could,” said Carscallen on Tuesday, adding that he has established his laboratory in a deserted 40-year-old autobody shop in Herring Cove, in suburban Halifax. “Our last piece of infrastructure is going in today, and that should last us through six to eight months of experiments.”

As well as his CleanTech Open winnings, Carscallen has received a $250,000 venture capital investment from Innovacorp and is discussing additional funding with the likes of Business Development Bank of Canada, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and Sustainable Development Technology Canada. As the winner of CleanTech Open, SABRTech received a $100,000 prize and an opportunity for a $200,000 investment. The provincial agency decided to up the investment to $250,000. Carscallen is now setting his sights on raising about $750,000 to $1.5 million in equity funding in the next two years.

The intermediate-term goal is to establish a pilot facility in Nova Scotia, ideally situating it alongside a power plant or other industrial facility so it could make use of waste water, especially warm water. “I think using water from other industrial plants is going to be critical in algae,” said Carscallen, who will pitch the company at the BioInnovation Challenge at BioPort Atlantic on Thursday.

To reduce the cost of fuel-from-algae technology, SABRTech is pioneering a bio-reactor that can produce algae more cheaply and dependably than other methods.

Scientists can currently extract fuel from algae through three types of systems: bio-reactors, raceways or open ponds. Bio-reactors have the greatest quality control of the three, but they're also the most expensive to operate. What Carscallen has done is use natural sunlight for the bio-reactor and reduce the amount of water needed, thereby lowering the cost while surrendering none of the quality control.

Since winning the contest, Carscallen and his partners – two full-time and two under-grads – have continued to run tests on the technology, and he said the yields have increased in all the experiments, with the most recent producing the highest yet. He hopes to hit optimal yields in tests next year.

One of the highlights of the work so far has been converting the derelict auto shop into a functioning lab. Carscallen himself carted untold mounds of junk out of the two-storey structure, cleaned and sanitized the building and then ordered the piece de resistance. He and his team are all comic book fans, so he asked an artist friend to come by and paint life-sized portraits of superheroes on the walls of the labs. Carscallen proudly carries photos of the portraits of Iron Man and Thor on his smartphone.

The spirit of Sheldon Cooper lives on in Herring Cove.