Nebraska base for algal oil plant
EVONIK and Royal DSM will locate the commercial scale production facility for their omega-3 fatty acids from natural marine algae in Blair, Nebraska.
DSM Nutritional Products and Evonik Nutrition & Care plan to invest around $200 million in the facility ($100 million by each party over two years).
The initial annual production capacity will meet roughly 15 per cent of the current total annual demand for EPA and DHA by the salmon aquaculture industry.
The facility is expected to come on stream in 2019. Both companies announced in the spring the start of a joint venture for this purpose. The establishment of the joint venture, to be named Veramaris and headquartered in the Netherlands, will be finalised, subject to regulatory approvals.
Blair, Nebraska, was chosen as it takes advantage of Evonik’s decades of operational experience for large-scale biotechnology operations.
The company has been operating a facility there for almost 20 years. The new plant will be located adjacent to Evonik’s current facility on Cargill’s site, with established access to the raw materials needed to produce the high value and pure EPA+DHA omega-3 fatty acid oil.
It will, for the first time, allow for the production of omega-3 fatty acids for animal nutrition without using any fish oil from wild caught fish, a finite resource. Initial applications will be in salmon aquaculture and pet food.
Evonik’s and DSM’s highly concentrated algal oil will enable the animal nutrition industry to keep up with the increasing demand for these two essential omega-3 fatty acids without endangering fish stocks.
Until the facility in Blair opens, DSM and Evonik will produce pilot-scale quantities of the algal oil at DSM’s production facility in Kingstree, South Carolina. Customers will be able to receive sizeable quantities of the product for market development while the construction of the new manufacturing plant gets underway.