Clean. Secure. Sustainable. 

We thought about the natural environment, the food producer and the consumer.  Where can seafood be sustainably produced? Where can farms increase production with minimum footprint? How can livestock and marine biomass be grown close to large markets? What port infrastructure and vessels are available for marine operations and maintenance? How can the ocean wilderness be protected? What capital equipment can the business model sustain? 

We listened.

We developed solutions to support farming in sympathy with the ocean.

iNNOVATIVE MARINE STRUCTURES ARE IN OUR DNA

We have seen it all before: Established offshore companies attempt to solve new offshore challenges using old solutions. But new markets need new approaches. We have worked with synthetic fibre ropes and elastomeric materials in the marine environment to solve shallow water mooring problems: to control the dynamics of structures in big waves, without it costing the earth. When we discovered what aquaculture producers wanted to do, we got stuck right in.

Salmon: Land-based containment or open ocean solutions?

Global salmon production is a $15.4 bn market, focused on sheltered water bodies in Norway, Chile and Scotland. There are efforts to double the sector’s production by 2030. Growth in conventional open net pens is becoming constrained due to increasing incidences of sea lice and disease as well as regulatory steps to restrict the number of licences in sensitive marine environments. The industry has reached a fork in the road: Does it move to costly “closed” aquaculture in controlled tanks or does it move into “open” solutions, submerged in resilient offshore environments. Or is it a combination of both? We know the latter will play a major role in future aquaculture production. A more energetic oceanic environment dilutes and dissipates bi-products as part of the natural process. Impact9’s technology heralds a new era of growth for the marine finfish sector: an environmentally sustainable and responsible protein source for the growing world population.

Shellfish: Better Growth in Higher Flow Environments?

Mussel production is a well-established industry and is usually undertaken in very sheltered sites with limited flow. Mussel growth and quality are known to be better in higher energy environments. But how can cost-competitiveness be maintained. Impact-9’s SeaStrut solution seeks to address this using a robust and simple flotation technology for longlines and that can attenuate wave loads, while offering buoyancy control to compensate for biomass growth. The same solution can be applied to other bi-valve shellfish as well as seaweed and algae production which are rapidly growing sectors of aquaculture.

Would you like to learn more about the Possibilities of open ocean farming with Impact9?