Atlantic Sapphire will reduce its 2021 harvest volume project as a result of a mass mortality incident that occurred at its recirculating aquaculture system salmon farm in Miami, Florida, U.S.A., on 23 March.
Atlantic Sapphire Chief Financing Officer and Managing Director Karl Øystein Øyehaug told Seafoodsource in an email the company experienced the death of approximately 500,000 fish with an average size of one kilogram each, and that the loss will make it impossible for Atlantic Sapphire to reach its 10,000-metric-ton harvest projection for 2021. Øyehaug said the company will be issuing an updated projection soon.
Assuming a potential harvest weight of 500,000 fish at four kilograms each, Atlantic Sapphire would have suffered a 2,000 MT loss if the fish had been raised to full harvest size. Assuming a harvest weight of five kilograms each, the loss would amount to an estimated 2,500 MT.
The company is going through the process of selling what it can of the deceased salmon, Øyehaug confirmed.
“We have no comments on the sales price, but note that the fish had an average weight of one kilogram, indicating that it is below marketable size,” he wrote.
According to the company, an initial analysis indicated a flaw in the design of the RAS caused “significant amounts of particles to flow from the drum filters (particle filtration systems) into the biofilters and trickling filters.”
Øyehaug said Atlantic Sapphire will be studying the accident but did not say if it would be working in conjunction with Billund Aquaculture, the equipment designer and manufacture of the farm.
“The issues that caused the incident were already known to the company and were in the process of being addressed. However, they had not yet been fixed in the growout system in question,” he said. “The company is conducting a thorough investigation to get the preliminary conclusions confirmed.”
Roy Høiås, the owner and CEO of Lighthouse Finance, a provider of financing for companies utilizing and advancing RAS technology, told SeafoodSource that problems like those encountered by Atlantic Sapphire – which has suffered three mass mortality incidents at its two farms in the past year – are not unusual for new farms.
“I talk to farmers in Norway a lot and they all have huge respect for ramping up systems,” he said. “It needs to settle down, like a new engine – you need to run it for some miles before actually friction-free.”
Høiås said with many fledgling RAS firms recently listed on public exchanges and Atlantic Sapphire’s project serving as “the one every investor has been looking at,” the accident will have a knock-on effect on stock prices.
“Anything bad coming out of Atlantic Sapphire will be felt by the market, and this result will have an impact, without a doubt,” he said. “But as long as others able to come out and show, produce, and deliver on their targets by the strategy they have decided to go to the market, that will in some sense take some pressure off Atlantic Sapphire. It’s my hope in next two years, we will have at least three or four players up and running farms, with a diversified supply of RAS tech solutions. I’m quite sure that will benefit the overall market, as it will give more comfort to investors that a problem with any one of them is not dealbreaker.”
Photo courtesy of Atlantic Sapphire
