Atlantic Sapphire
Norwegian farmer sees finish line in sight for Atlantic Sapphire
JOHAN Andreassen is not daunted by the vast scale of the RAS farm he is building in Miami. The main difference between this plant and the facility in Denmark where the technology has been tested is in the number of units. ‘It’s a little bit like if you can drive one car you can drive ten cars. It’s not like it’s a bigger car, it’s just multiple cars,’ the founder and CEO of Oslo listed Atlantic Sapphire told Fish Farmer over the phone from Miami last month.
Andreassen is the driving force behind the world’s biggest land based salmon farm, which aims to produce 90,000 tonnes of fish to market by 2026, and ‘make Florida a salmon state’.
‘It’s a blueprint of the Denmark facility but we’re building it six times bigger, so we have six farms, six systems next to each other here in Miami, with the identical size and dimensioning as our phase two
expansion in Denmark,’ he said.
‘It’s not like we’re doing something here that we haven’t done before on a systemic side, just that we have multiple systems next to each other.’
Many of the companies behind the Miami farm also supplied Atlantic Sapphire’s Langsand Laks farm in Hvide Sande, Denmark.
The design and engineering partner for the RAS technology is Billund Aquaculture. And there are other companies that deliver different phases into the project, that is known as the Bluehouse.
Some of the equipment is more advanced
“The ultimate dream has always been to do this in America”
and bigger, such as Norwegian company Optimar’s harvesting machinery that also makes fillets and ‘looks like a Norwegian salmon processing plant’, said Andreassen.
In Denmark, the technology has been honed since 2011, and now has achieved a biomass of 870 tonnes (real live weight), which will produce an annual yield of 2,900 tonnes.
Andreassen told the North Atlantic Seafood Forum (NASF) in Bergen in March that the Langsand venture had achieved proof of concept, with ‘considerable learning from continued process improvements, as well as mistakes’.
It is this hard won expertise that has inspired the confidence of investors – Norway’s influential DNB bank has now backed the Miami farm (see page 36) – and industry veterans, such as Bjorn Myrseth, a fish farmer with more than 40 years’ experience and past president of the European Aquaculture Society, who is on Atlantic Sapphire’s board.
Denmark will continue to serve as centre for innovation and testing of new technologies for global adoption across the organisation, according to Atlantic Sapphire.
Meanwhile, the Florida farm introduced the first batch of 800,000 eggs – supplied by StofnFiskur of Iceland- into the hatchery last November.
The company said it is well underway with construction of its phase one build out, with some 1.15 million fish in the 400,000 square feet site.
The projected harvest of approximately 10,000 tonnes of salmon annually is due to begin in Q3, 2020.
In January, Andreassen was upbeat about future earnings: ‘We will be in full operation and make money from subsidiary level in Denmark already in the second quarter of this year, when we are in full operation and the plant produces what it should. Then it will be another year before the plant in Miami comes out with harvesting fish. From mid-2020, the entire group will be ‘cash positive’,’ he said.
To minimise the risks, the farms in Miami are separated so that if a problem occurs in one unit it is contained.
‘Once the water comes out of the ground or the well, it is diverted into independent systems and it never crosses, so it’s biosecure,’ said Andreassen.
The water, 99 per cent of which is recycled, is being continuously purified to remain clear by a state of the art filtration system.
The site, in Homestead to the west of Miami, was chosen after a search of 14 states in the US and has ‘unique advantages’, Andreassen added. ‘It’s the geology in south Florida that makes it possible.
‘Where you locate these farms is very, very important; it’s a little bit like you need certain natural given conditions to do net pen farming, but you also need, or you should have, natural given conditions to do large scale land based farming as well.
‘It’s not a chicken barn that you can locate wherever you find a piece of land.’
The site benefits from unlimited water in an ancient artesian aquifer, an underground layer of water-bearing rock. The water is more than 20,000 years old and has never been exposed to man-made contamination, the company said.
The area is the only one the company found with high quality salt and fresh groundwater in sufficiently large quantities. Just as important, is a sustainable, cost efficient means of disposing of the waste water.
‘Those two factors in combination is why we are where we are and we think it is a very unique advantage,’ said Andreassen.
He appointed Eric Meyer, a hydrogeologist who knows ‘the most about ground water in Florida’, and secured permits to drill wells for both freshwater and saltwater, and for waste disposal.
The waste water is injected through a big well that goes 3,000 feet below the surface into a layer called the boulder zone.
‘It is a zone where the municipality is disposing of treated human waste and other things so it’s actually a zone where our waste water will never enter the ocean or any river or any lake.
‘So we don’t have to deal with the concerns you have in other places where you actually have an impact on the environment locally.’
The waste generated in the Miami Bluehouse will be used as fertiliser and for the creation of
renewable energy in the form of biogas.
As for fish health and welfare, Atlantic Sapphire said its salmon will never have contact with sea lice or be exposed to wild fish diseases. And the fish are free to swim against strong currents, as they do in the wild.
The company has recruited 25 people on to the payroll so far in Miami and this will increase to 100 within the next year and a half, said Andreassen.
Americans who are new to the system are sent to Denmark on an exchange programme, using the Danish farm for training.
‘We are sending Americans and others over there to learn, and some people are being moved from the Danish facility to our American facility.’
Andreassen said he and the company are approached by a lot of interested players, from America, Asia and Europe, but he stressed that these tend to be from projects still at the proposal stage.
While Atlantic Sapphire has fish in the water, the others are ‘just designing, talking about it and raising money’.
‘I think it’s a stretch to say there are a lot of farms coming up in America. There are a lot of proposed farms in America but, to my knowledge, no big farms have been built at this time.’
Andreassen told delegates at the NASF that
“It’s not like we’re doing something here that we haven’t before” done
some analysts are overestimating the impact of land based production in the early years.
‘Realistically, I do not expect more than 20,000 to 30,000 metric tons coming from land based production by 2022,’ he said.
He told Fish Farmer that rearing significant harvest volumes on land ‘will take more time than people think’.
‘You have to keep in mind that this is a very, very large construction, unseen in the aquaculture sector, it’s more comparable to a large oil manufacturing refinery.
‘It’s massive investment, a lot of capital, a lot of talent, you need permits, design partners, construction partners, you need to procure all the equipment. A lot of things go into this.
‘It takes a lot of time to design it, then it takes a lot of time to build, and then you have to raise the fish, which takes at least 20 months.
‘So, knowing that, and then you look at the calendar, it’s quite obvious what harvest volumes will come out of land based in the next few years.
‘It’s not realistic I think until 2022 maybe 2023- I don’t see farms that are not yet in construction having harvests any time before that. What happens from 2023 on, that’s a different story and that is yet to be seen.’
His own project, though, is a source of pride after the years of research and trial and error.
‘I’ve spent nine years so far on land based. The ultimate dream has always been to do this in America, where you have to bring in fish in planes. To see that the US plant is coming up is fantastic.
‘It’s still a risk, things can and will happen, obviously. It’s live animals and I don’t expect it to be smooth sailing by any means.
‘But we see the finish line now, it’s exciting times for sure.’