Regulatory and environmental approvals take time to achieve and can be a difficult hurdle for start-ups. Algae producer SuSeWi successfully collaborated with South African government officials from several countries in order to expand.
We started off in South Africa, which is where I'm from originally, actually. We were doing work with the Minister of Science and Technology there to work with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. And we did our early experimentation there. And once we proved that it would work in the real world, we then started to look at where we could get a site to situate one of these full scale farms.
And when we talk about full scale, it's an order of magnitude bigger than the numbers you've mentioned. So we now have a 6,000 hectare site in Morocco. And in fact, one of the very difficult stages of this all was to get all of the approvals at a governmental level. And we've worked now with three different governments, the South African government, the government of Oman and the government of Morocco. And these are big areas. It's quite complex.
We need a lot of regulatory approvals. We need environmental approvals. We're putting a pipeline into the sea. There is a lot of collaboration across different institutions in countries. So that's in fact been a very, very hard part. The technology itself, we built the site that you can now see on screen in six weeks flat, but in fact, to get the approvals took a very long time. So what we've discovered in fact is that the people side of the business is much more complex and slow than the technology itself and that's actually very possibly, when you speak to a lot of founders, that is the harder side.