Seaweed spin-out eyes salmon industry
Co-founded by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), last week, AT~SEA Technologies aims to develop the means of setting up seaweed farms across the globe and will be establishing their test site, in Norway, this September.
Dr Philip Kerrison, who heads SAMS’ involvement with the project, told Fish Farming Expert that the company’s initial test will take place at a 1 hectare site in a Norwegian fjord, before being expanded to 4 hectares in 2016, with the aim to make the systems commercially available by 2017.
The spin-out follows on from the At-Sea project, which started in 2012, and successfully developed seaweed cultivation sheets that increased the surface area for growing various species of seaweed, with Saccharina latissima being one of the most in demand.
“The company will be a one stop shop – we’ll be able to select suitable sites, sort out any legal issues and train up staff to run the farms,” Dr Kerrison explains.
“We’ve got the whole culturing process sorted already,” he adds, “but we’ve still to refine the mechanisation process, so that we can automate the seeding and harvesting.”
“We see the salmon industry as being one of our key customers, and seaweed could be part of a more widespread IMTA approach, with the end product having a number of uses – largely in the food, feed and cosmetic sectors,” he reflects.
And at last month’s WAS conference in South Korea, Dr Kerrison’s idea “met with a lot of interest from around the world”, while the project has also caught the attention of “a couple of the big alginate companies”, he reveals.
It will be interesting to see whether the concept is embraced by the salmon industry once it’s been refined.
