How a blue food colouring — phycocyanin — might just be the next most important source of new Net Zero wealth…

How Microalgae nurtured with Captured CO₂ Are Becoming an Industrial Resource

Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) is often framed as a cost centre—a necessary intervention to reduce emissions.

But a new generation of technologies is emerging that use industrial CO₂ as input for growing something called microalgae. Why that’s interesting: it means you can transform emissions into valuable, market-ready products.

Among the most promising of these is something called phycocyanin—a vibrant blue compound with applications across food, cosmetics, and health.

What is ‘phycocyanin’?

Phycocyanin is a naturally occurring pigment-protein complex found in cyanobacteria (commonly known as blue-green algae). It plays a key role in photosynthesis, helping these organisms capture light energy. Structurally, it is a water-soluble protein with a distinctive bright blue colour and fluorescent properties, absorbing orange-red light and emitting blue light.

Why should I care?

Because beyond its biological role, phycocyanin is attracting significant commercial attention. It is non-toxic, biodegradable, and bioactive—which means it doesn’t just colour products, it can also provide functional health benefits.

In other words: this is a component of many products people want to pay money for.

And it turns out that you can grow it yourself out of what you’re putting out of your factory chimney.

Where is phycocyanin of commercial interest?

1. Natural Food Colouring
   Consumer demand is rapidly shifting away from synthetic dyes, and phycocyanin offers a rare and valuable alternative: a stable, plant-based blue pigment. As a result, it is already used in a growing range of beverages, confectionery, dairy products, and nutritional supplements. (Interestingly, blue is actually one of the hardest colours to source naturally (that’s why our ancestors were awfully keen on woad), making phycocyanin (from wherever we can get it) especially valuable. As food companies continue to look for ethical product sources, demand will continue to grow)
2. Nutraceuticals and Functional Foods
   Phycocyanin is rich in antioxidants and is being widely studied for potential anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, and immune-supporting properties. This positions it as a premium ingredient in supplements, wellness drinks, and fortified foods—categories with strong margins and robust consumer growth
3. Cosmetics and the $700 billion Personal Care Market
   In the huge skincare ecosystem, phycocyanin is used both as a natural colourant and as an active ingredient. Its antioxidant properties can help protect skin from oxidative stress, making it attractive for anti-ageing and protective formulations
4. Biotechnology and Diagnostics
   Because of its in-built fluorescent properties, phycocyanin is also used in laboratory diagnostics and research applications. While smaller in volume as a market than others we’re discussing here, this is absolutely a high-value segment with strong pricing power.

Is microalgae + CO₂ really a powerful business model?

So, there is huge interest in this molecule, but the real innovation isn’t just phycocyanin—it’s how it’s produced.

Microalgae can be cultivated using CO₂ as a primary carbon source. Heavy industries like cement production are, of course, large emitters of CO₂. So, if we can capture this carbon and direct it to tanks in which we can cultivate microalgae, can we drive production at industrial scale?

Yes, we can. We’ve developed a unique system that takes captured CO₂ and feeds it into photobioreactors (PRBs), in which we grow microalgae, at scale.

When integrated with industrial emitters, our solution creates a circular system: emissions are captured and directly converted into biomass. That biomass can then be refined into multiple co-products, including phycocyanin, proteins, lipids, and bio-based materials.

This is a model with several compelling advantages:

1. Turning Overhead into Revenue
   Traditional carbon capture is expensive and generates no direct return. In sharp and welcome contrast, algae-based CCU systems produce saleable outputs. Phycocyanin alone is part of a market projected to reach hundreds of millions of dollars, with multiple end uses and business streams
2. High Product Value Density
   Unlike fuels or bulk chemicals, phycocyanin is a high-value, low-volume product. That means smaller facilities can generate meaningful revenue—critical for early-stage deployment and scaling
3. Multi-Product Revenue Streams
   It turns out that phycocyanin is just one component of microalgal biomass; the same cultivation process can yield additional products such as ‘alternative’ proteins for food and feed, omega-rich oils, or bioplastics. This diversification reduces risk and improves overall economics
4. Sustainability as a Consumer Selling Point
   Gen Z and other end users—especially in food and cosmetics—are actively seeking sustainable ingredients. A pigment derived from captured CO₂ provides a powerful story for brands looking to reduce their environmental footprint and appeal to the growing global cohort of eco-conscious consumers
5. Compatibility with Industrial Infrastructure
   Microalgae systems can be co-located with emitters such as power plants, cement facilities, or biogas operations. This reduces transport costs and enables direct utilization of flue gases, improving efficiency, and dramatically reducing time-to-value.

Aren’t there lots of obstacles to making this scale beyond the lab?

Like any emerging technology, algae-based CCU faces challenges. Early investigations are presenting some information that phycocyanin can be sensitive to heat and light, limiting some applications, and production systems must be optimized for yield and stability.

Travel back in a Time Machine to 1960, and you’d find equivalent doubts about the prospects for computing to move outside the mainframe room. This is a fast-moving area, and advances in strain engineering, photobioreactor design, and downstream processing are rapidly addressing these issues.

Today, CCU players are interested in the promise of these approaches, and so are starting the hard work on improving extraction efficiency, stabilizing formulations, and scaling production—all of which are driving costs down and expanding market potential.

We’ve already done this – and our solution is ready for adoption.

Maybe it’s time to rethink what the word ‘carbon’ represents

What makes the conversation around phycocyanin relevant for budget holders in emitting industries is that it’s not a blue-pigment protein complex, but what it represents: evidence of a broader shift in how we can think about carbon itself.

Instead of treating CO₂ solely as useless and even harmful waste, technologies like microalgae cultivation are starting to reframe it as the raw material for a new generation of bio-based materials.

It could even be seen as an exciting development completely outside the whole Net Zero initiative—but the fact that this form of CCU actually completely aligns with wider climate goals adds a whole other level of importance to thinking about what we can do with carbon products.

From national and international governments alike, economic incentives are trying to kick-start business models that are both profitable and sustainable.

But what if we ended up not needing those grants at all—and CCU itself, led by the multiple applications of things like microalgae-derived phycocyanin, could be the next trillion-dollar business opportunity?

So, are we going from:

• extraction to regeneration
• emission to opportunity
• ‘Green’ to ‘greenback’?

That’s a colour we’d be happy to ‘paint’ a business—and blue seems a great place to start.

And that’s why you should care about phycocyanin and all it can do for you.

If you’d want to hear more, let’s start a promising CCU conversation today.