Aquatic Prosperity Vessels
A treatment plant that can reach the water that needs it.
Fixed plant treats whatever is piped to it. A bay will not be piped anywhere. So the plant goes to sea, and every constraint on this page follows from that one decision.
An Aquatic Prosperity Vessel is a working boat whose payload happens to be gas handling and treatment rather than cargo, nets or survey equipment. The designation is ours. The flag, the survey and the manning are entirely ordinary.
The physics of why the treatment works belongs to the platform, and SeaBreather sets it out properly. What follows is the operator's half of it: what sits on the deck, and what constrains which hull can work which water.
The deck, item by item
Seven things, and none of them is exotic on its own. The engineering is in getting all seven onto a hull that can still hold station in a two-meter sea.
- The intake A coarse bar-rack that keeps large animals and debris out, a low approach velocity, and a draw depth set to the layer that has actually failed rather than to whatever happens to be at the surface. Inside a contracted zone, certain areas are mapped as places no water is taken from at all.
- Gas storage and generation Oxygen carried aboard, and ozone generated from it on demand rather than stored. What the reactor is fed is made up for the duty in front of it rather than poured from a fixed recipe.
- The contained reactor Where the treatment happens, inside the hull. Gas is sheared into the sub-micron range in line with the flow, the water takes what the duty calls for, and none of it is in contact with the bay while any of that is going on.
- The outlet Treated water returned to the layer that lost its oxygen. On a stratified estuary in August, that means below the thermocline. Putting the effluent into the warm skin of a capped column is a photograph, not a result.
- The instrument set Profiling through depth for dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, pH and turbidity, plus sampling points on the water going in and the water going out. Read either side, at the same depths, every pass.
- The log Position, time, draw depth, throughput, the duty the reactor ran, and the assays either side of it. Written as it happens, not reconstructed. An inspector will eventually read this rather than any of our documents, so it is treated as the product.
- Endurance Fuel, gas, crew hours and hull time. Replenishment for all four is designed into the zone before the first pass rather than improvised in month two.
The first of those is the one a technical reviewer goes at hardest, and rightly. Nineteen thousand liters a minute is an intake before it is anything else, so the question of what happens to eggs and larvae arrives early and deserves an engineering answer rather than a reassurance: the bar-rack, the low approach velocity, the selectable draw depth and the areas inside a zone where nothing is taken at all. A large animal at the rack is one of the conditions that halts the work outright. What the intake would do in your particular water is assessed at the site read and written into the scope with its exclusion areas named.
What decides the tier
Vessels come in three tiers — Nimble, Standard and Mega. Which one suits a zone is settled by physical constraints long before anybody discusses budget, and the constraints usually disagree with each other.
| Constraint | What it settles |
|---|---|
| Draft over the shallowest working ground | The hard ceiling, and the one that usually decides it. |
| Transit time from a usable berth | How much of a working day is treatment and how much is passage. |
| Gas endurance between replenishments | Whether a hull works to a schedule or to a supply chain. |
| Deck area and power | How much generation and oxidation capacity physically fits. |
| Sea state and crew rotation | How many days of a contracted season are genuinely workable. |
Two of those deserve expanding. Shallow ground beats every other consideration on the list — a reef flat or a lagoon entrance rules out a bigger hull whatever the budget says, and a far corner of a zone first reached at noon is a corner that gets treated badly for the rest of the season. Gas is the other one. Past a certain zone size it stops being a question of fitting a larger tank and becomes a question of bringing a second hull, which is the next section.
Which tier suits which kind of water is tabulated on the platform's own site. This table is the other half of that question: what stops a tier from working a zone even when the water looks right for it.
Super SeaBreather
Past a certain zone size, the second hull is gas.
A vessel that has to break off and steam to a replenishment berth is a vessel not treating anything for the duration. On a small zone that is an inconvenience. On a national program it is the difference between a fleet and a rota.
The Super SeaBreather configuration answers it by pairing a working hull with a dedicated gas barge, so replenishment happens alongside, in the zone, at the pace the treatment actually consumes. It is also the point at which an industrial gas partner stops being a supplier and becomes a party to the venture.
This is a configuration we deploy, not a separate vessel class. The treatment stage aboard is the same one described on the treatment page.
Specifications and the permit
A permit, a regulator, and the craft it allows in the water.
Two throughput figures appear below. They belong to two different boats, and reading them together produces nonsense.
A SeaBreather hull is specified at approximately 5,000 gallons per minute of contained throughput — about 19,000 liters a minute. One capacity, not two: the flow that goes through the reactor is the same flow that leaves oxygen-enriched. That is the number a contract carries, and the calibration phase measures it on your own water against parameters written down before a hull moves. Anything specific to a named bay arrives after the site read, in writing, with its assumptions attached.
The other figure belongs to a different craft entirely. Florida's Department of Environmental Protection issued permit FLOA00062 in September 2024 for a red tide mitigation trial, on a five-year window that opens only when live Karenia brevis exceeds 100,000 cells per liter. The boat named in it is a modified personal watercraft producing ozonated seawater at 1,000 to 2,000 gallons a minute — a fraction of the displacement and a fraction of the throughput of anything described further up this page. The Sarasota Bay Estuary Program and the nonprofit START each wrote up the grant on their own sites.
So a state regulator examined the proposal and allowed a bounded trial in its own water. Proving the same thing across a bay is the work after that, and the estuary program has asked to be the body monitoring it. The documents behind a program are listed in one place.
Asked by harbormasters and naval architects
Three about the hull
What does APV stand for?
Aquatic Prosperity Vessel. Ours, not a registry class.
It is shorthand for a working boat carrying a treatment plant as payload. Flag, survey and manning follow the ordinary rules for a vessel of that size in that water, and no part of this arrangement asks a maritime authority to invent a category.
What throughput does a hull contract to?
Approximately 5,000 gallons per minute per vessel — about 19,000 liters a minute — of contained throughput. One capacity, not two: the flow that gets treated is the flow that leaves oxygen-enriched.
That is the specification a contract carries, and the calibration phase measures it on your water against parameters set down in writing beforehand. A result that misses those parameters closes the phase. A figure for a named bay follows the site read, never precedes it.
Will hulls be available for our season?
Confirmed against your dates at the site read, and written into the contract before anything is committed.
A contracted zone buys standing presence: hulls, gas supply and accredited crew inside the boundary before the season opens. Agree a program after the water has already turned and it becomes a mobilization instead, and mobilizing a fleet takes longer than a bloom takes to close a beach.
The duties this hull carries
Draft, distance, season
Send us a chart and a month.
Bathymetry, the nearest working berth and the weeks you need covered are enough to say which tier a zone would take, and whether the honest answer is that it would take none of them.