Evidence of meeting #14 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was systems.
A recording is available from Parliament.
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
I call this meeting to order.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us today. On behalf of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, we appreciate your taking the time to meet with us to try to answer some of the questions we might have arising from comments you might make and to respond to concerns that members have regarding the aquaculture industry.
Mr. Werring, I believe you're going to lead off for your group via video conference. Is that correct?
3:40 p.m.
John Werring Aquatic Habitat Specialist, Marine and Freshwater Conservation Program, David Suzuki Foundation
No, Chair. David Lane is actually going to lead us off.
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Thank you.
Mr. Lane, we generally allow about 10 minutes for presentations. At that time I would ask you to introduce your associates, who are there with you today and joining you in the video conference, and Dr. Tyedmers, who is joining us here in our committee room as well. You'll hear a beeping noise to indicate that your time has expired. The members are constrained by the 10-minute timeframe for questions and answers, so you'll hear a beeping noise throughout the committee proceedings today. Don't be alarmed by it, but I ask that after you hear the noise, you bring your comments to a conclusion. I'd appreciate that.
Mr. Lane, please begin with your opening comments.
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
I have a point of order.
Chair, may I interrupt for a second?
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
John Weston Conservative West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
I'm seeing a little pane on the screen. It's not clear to me that the people who are there in the room know who's here, so maybe you could give them a sense of who is on the committee, unless they already know that. It might take 10 seconds.
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Thank you, Mr. Weston, for your point.
I'm assuming that the people making the presentations today are aware of the members of the committee, and when you ask questions, you'll be recognized at that time. We're counting on the video to show your face to the members who are joining us here today, but for the interest of the people joining us by video conference, we have Mr. Allen, Mr. Calkins, Mr. Kamp, Ms. O'Neill-Gordon, Mr. Weston, Mr. MacAulay, Mr. Byrne, Mr. Andrews, Monsieur Blais, Monsieur Plamondon, and Mr. Donnelly. They are all members of the committee, as am I. I am Mr. Weston as well.
Mr. Lane, if you would proceed with your presentation, I would appreciate it. Thank you.
3:40 p.m.
David Lane Executive Director, T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation, David Suzuki Foundation
My name is David Lane. I'm with the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation. To one side of me is John Werring, who is with the David Suzuki Foundation, and Ruby Berry, from the Georgia Strait Alliance. On the other side is Michelle Molnar, also from the David Suzuki Foundation.
May I get clarification about the 10 minutes? Is that 10 minutes for us as a four-person panel, or 10 minutes for each individual?
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
3:40 p.m.
Executive Director, T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation, David Suzuki Foundation
Okay, very good. We'll be brief, then.
We are here representing a coalition of groups in British Columbia called the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, which is made up of the groups that are here at the table, and also Watershed Watch and the Living Oceans Society. We've been together as a group for 10 years now, working on issues related to environmental impacts from salmon aquaculture and looking at solutions, which we believe very much point in the direction of closed-containment technologies that can eliminate most or all of the environmental impacts that have been flagged by the scientific community.
My organization is the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation. For clarity, this organization is separate from the David Suzuki Foundation, with a different history and a focus solely on fisheries, whereas the David Suzuki Foundation has a very broad mandate.
I want to introduce the issue of closed containment, which we believe is a very viable solution to the problems described in the scientific literature regarding open-net salmon farming in British Columbia. We believe it manages to accomplish the key solutions.
Sea lice is one of the most noted subjects, as far as impacts from salmon aquaculture are concerned. With closed containment, there would be no sea lice problems whatsoever, and no disease problems feeding back into the ocean environment. We're assuming that most closed-containment systems would be on land; therefore, those problems would be eliminated entirely.
The problem of escaped farmed fish would be eliminated entirely, as would the problem of marine mammal kills--that's sea lions and seals, which happen in large numbers on the B.C. coast because of predator attacks--and the problem of antibiotics and pesticides going into the ocean environment. All of these problems can be solved by land-based closed containment. That is why our coalition sees it as an alternative that should be mandated and should be supported by governments, and we should be moving towards a transition on those technologies.
We believe there are a number of myths that exist as far as closed containment is concerned, and those myths are very easily addressed. Often it's said that closed-containment technologies are not economically or technically viable, and our speakers will be addressing those issues.
It has been noted by some that there is more energy consumption and therefore more greenhouse gas. There's also waste produced that has to be dealt with. In fact, we believe that all of those issues can be solved very easily by using the waste as a resource. Fish waste can be used as a fertilizer for aquaponics that grow other products, notably agricultural products in greenhouses. It has been tried with a lot of different kinds of aquaculture.
Also, fish waste can be used as an energy source. Through anaerobic digestion it can create enough energy to run an entire closed-containment system and probably produce some excess energy as well.
With that as an introduction, I'm going to give the floor to John Werring. John is from the David Suzuki Foundation.
3:45 p.m.
Aquatic Habitat Specialist, Marine and Freshwater Conservation Program, David Suzuki Foundation
Thanks, David.
Mr. Chair, my name is John Werring. I'm with the David Suzuki Foundation. I'm an aquatic habitat specialist. I have a Master of Science degree from the University of British Columbia and I'm a registered professional biologist in the province of British Columbia.
I want to bring out the point that one our goals at the David Suzuki Foundation, and with CAAR in general, is to try to get the Canadian aquaculture industry to transition to a more sustainable and less environmentally destructive method of raising seafood. Closed-system aquaculture is certainly one of those options, and it is probably the best option to pursue.
One of the issues I'd like to raise today is that we've been made aware that the Canadian government is proposing to expand the aquaculture industry in Canada within the next decade, and the way they propose to do that is solely through the use of current open-net pen technology. We are trying to get the government to consider using closed systems to obtain that level of expansion, but anybody who brings this up when they attend a meeting to discuss this new strategy is being told that it is not an option. The new strategy is called the national aquaculture strategic action plan initiative, and it is being promoted by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Anybody who questions the use of open-net pen technology and asks that they consider closed systems is being told that it is not an option. We think this is something that the committee needs to be made aware of.
Thank you very much.
3:45 p.m.
Michelle Molnar Marine Researcher and Policy Analysis, David Suzuki Foundation
My name is Michelle Molnar. I'm with the David Suzuki Foundation. I have a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Public Policy from Simon Fraser University.
While it is generally held that close containment technology offers several environmental benefits, debate remains over whether this technology is economically viable. As of yet, there has been no economic analysis completed on closed-containment aquaculture that considers all of its impacts from a societal viewpoint.
However, there have been two recent attempts at a financial analysis. These studies consider a subset of the costs and benefits that apply to the owner-operator or the investor. Both studies find that land-based aquaculture can produce a positive net income, and we recommend that the next step should be to expand upon the analysis to consider all stakeholders who have standing, including government, first nations, the environment, local communities, and the public at large.
One of the two existing studies or financial analyses I referred to was completed by Dr. Andrew Wright with Save Our Salmon. He found that the capital costs were approximately $12 million. The annual operating costs are less than $6 million. The net income range is anywhere from $5 million to $13 million, depending upon your harvest strategies. The higher end of the range is associated with a potential of using waste as a feedstock for a secondary product, which David referred to earlier.
The second study has recently been completed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They found that capital costs were approximately $22 million, that annual operating costs were about $7 million, that there was a positive net income of approximately $600,000 and that the net present value, using year three as a benchmark, is approximately negative $2 million.
However, we found that the capital costs were high. Estimates of the cost of land and the amount of land and equipment were excessive. There were some concerns regarding assumptions around feed cost labour estimates, the contingency rate, and the depreciation rates used, and there was no consideration of environmental impacts.
CARR and Marine Harvest have jointly agreed to conduct an economic analysis. This analysis will be completed in four phases. The first phase is to develop performance criteria. The second stage is to complete a financial analysis similar to what's been done by DFO and Andrew Wright. The third stage will identify external impacts and will attempt to monetize them where possible. The final stage will look at developing an economic model that considers economies of scale; production efficiencies; a range of environmental, socio-economic, and performance matrices; and the cost savings related to locating this technology near more developed centres.
3:50 p.m.
Ruby Berry Program Coordinator, Salmon Aquaculture, Georgia Strait Alliance, David Suzuki Foundation
Hello, everyone. My name is Ruby Berry. I'm with the Georgia Strait Alliance, and I'd like to talk about the community economic development potential.
I understand you have come across the report that we co-authored outlining the global assessment of closed-system aquaculture, and I wanted to just point out that while it's a good overview and most of the systems in that report are still in operation, the report was out of date almost as soon as we published it. According to the operators, this technology is developing by leaps and bounds and is hard to keep track of in any kind of published manner.
As a result of that, what we're seeing is that the technology for closed containment has improved to the point that there is no doubt in any of the engineers' or operators' minds that this is a technologically viable system for growing fish, and indeed has the potential for actually being much more efficient in that the growth ratios and the conditions the fish are grown in actually can be optimized and the fish can probably be grown quite a bit faster.
As a result, a number of communities and enterprises are looking at developing closed containment. We know of five to seven projects that are in development at the moment, and some of them are actually ready to hit the ground. The only barrier at this point is investment. It's an economic barrier. In the spreadsheets, research on the economics of it shows a likely turnaround of investment in five to seven years. It's just that the initial investment is a challenge.
There are a number of first nations, small operators, and engineers who are currently working on hatchery systems to grow it--it's an expansion, essentially, of hatchery technology--who are recognizing the value in this of local jobs. Closed containment can be sited in less remote areas, so they can actually be close to the labour force. We're seeing expectations of increased food security. We're seeing development of projects from small local-sized projects the size of one current open-net farm--projects that can feed the local economy, provide jobs, and also provide some local food--all the way to very large industry-sized operations that are looking at exporting and competing with the current open-net systems.
There are two closed-containment systems in operation right now. One is an operation in the Lower Mainland that essentially feeds a niche market in the restaurant community in Vancouver, and the other one is in Washington State. It has just developed a relationship with Overwaitea Food Group, which is now selling closed-containment salmon in their stores at the moment and has said to us that they're not looking at a price premium. They're selling it at the same rate as the fish grown in open nets and they're still turning a profit. They've said to us very clearly, “If you build it, we will buy it”. They're very clearly interested in an ecologically sustainable way to grow salmon in farms, and they're supporting the move to closed containment.
As I said, a number of these groups are ready to hit the ground running, and the only real barrier that we're seeing is that there's a need for some infusion of income.
We're looking to you for some recommendations for some government funding. There are a number of mechanisms already in place through the AIMAP program and other funding programs. This would work very easily with them if funding could be directed toward the development of closed containment. Funding needs to be larger than the current particular allocations in order to get these operations under way, but as I said, it's not very long before they become self-sustaining economically as well as environmentally.
3:55 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Thank you very much.
Dr. Tyedmers, do you have some opening comments?
3:55 p.m.
Dr. Peter Tyedmers Associate Professor, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University
Thank you for your interest and for the invitation to appear here. This is the first time I've ever had this sort of opportunity.
My name is Peter Tyedmers. I'm an ecological economist. My training includes undergraduate degrees in geological sciences and the law prior to undertaking my PhD studies at UBC in a department called resource management and environmental studies. Indeed, I know a couple of former colleagues from the west coast who have joined us by video conference.
For the last nine years I've been employed in the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University. I was first appointed in 2001 as an assistant professor. In 2007 I became a tenured associate professor.
Within the domain of ecological economics, my research interests encompass an understanding of what I and others refer to as the life cycle energy and environmental impacts of food systems. We use something called life cycle assessment to try to understand the aggregate flows of material and energy inputs into how we produce things. My interests are in using LCA to understand the impacts of food systems, in particular fisheries- and aquaculture-related seafood systems, and the role technologies can play in moving us away from, or towards, more sustainable futures.
With colleagues and students, I've worked on a variety of research projects within fisheries and aquaculture, looking at U.S.-Canadian lobster fisheries, Antarctic krill fisheries, and global energy inputs to capture fisheries. I suspect, given the context of your current interest, that potentially you're most interested in the work we did in terms of our salmon life cycle assessment project. This was work that my students and I undertook with colleagues from the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and from Ecotrust, based in Portland, Oregon.
It set out to try to characterize and understand the scale of material and energy flows and the resulting environmental impacts, at a global scale--meaning contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, utrifying emissions, etc.--associated with the major salmon farming regions of the world, those being Norway, Chile, Scotland, Alaska, and British Columbia. We do rank fourth in the world in production.
In the context of this project we also wanted to look at alternative ways in which salmon could be produced. One of my students undertook some work looking at what differences might flow from producing salmon organically, and another student undertook work looking at the potential implications of using alternative culture technologies, so we were looking at different environments in which we could grow salmonids. I'm assuming that this is the work that you're most interested in right now.
This work was led by my former student, Dr. Nathan Ayer. All of the work, including this, used what I refer to as life cycle assessment. The major question that we set out to answer was to better understand a potential shift from conventional net-pen culture to other forms of production. We and the people who joined us by video conference think we have a good understanding of the benefits these systems will provide in terms of reducing local ecological impacts, but to date, or before we did this work, we didn't really understand the scale of material and energy requirements to drive these systems and how these translate into broad-scale environmental concerns.
We undertook work to compare a very typical net-pen production in British Columbia as of the mid-2000s with a marine-based bag system that had been trialed in British Columbia, along with data from what we call a flow-through tank farm using salt water pumped out of the ocean into three tanks in which the salmon were cultured commercially for, I think, a total of three years, or two full grow-out cycles. We also used data from a very new farm. It's about four or five years old. It's a freshwater-based, recirculating culture technology system based in Nova Scotia, just outside Truro.
One thing I would mention is that while the other three systems we modelled were all culturing Atlantic salmon, the farm in Nova Scotia was culturing Arctic char. For our current purposes, I think the difference in species is less critical, but if people have an interest in it, I'd be pleased to discuss it.
We chose these systems because actual real data were available. We didn't set out to model artificial or theoretical systems, although those could be very interesting and insightful analyses to do. These were actual opportunities to exploit real data from real-world pilot studies or commercial operations to understand what it takes to grow salmon in different culture systems.
It was also a nice study from my perspective, because it allowed us to look at a spectrum of ways for culturing fish. If we think of a net pen as a fairly open system and a fully enclosed freshwater-based recirculating system as a system in which, if fish get out, all they do is flop around on the floor until they die, the study spans the whole range of potential technologies that are under consideration.
Before I briefly turn to some of our results, let me highlight two things.
Our work did not look at the local ecological benefits of these systems or the costs, nor did we have a chance to look at socio-economic dimensions.
The other important issue is that we did not attempt to quantify what might be possible with these technologies if they operated more efficiently, either because of economies of scale or because better technologies were applied through the use of better pumps or new ways of doing things with different feeds. We took the systems as they existed and as they were running. We found marked differences in the performance of the systems modelled.
I'll very briefly give a little background. When you do this type of work and look at a net-pen system, for example, you're concerned about the total amount of greenhouses gases that are emitted to produce a tonne of salmon. Typically 90% of greenhouse gases result from the provision of feed. As for what happens at the farm site or what happens when moving boats around, it doesn't really contribute very much at all. That's what we saw in the case of a net-pen culture system.
However, as you move towards a more intensive and more contained culture, you have to substitute eco-technologies, using pumps to move water around and adding oxygen, either in the form of bottled oxygen or oxygen generators. You need to use technologies to clean the water if you're going to have a recirculating system; otherwise, the environment isn't conducive to growing fish.
All of these technologies require power. You're substituting for the ecosystem services that are enjoyed by a net pen. Water flows through it, it's oxygenated, and it removes wastes. These things come at a price to local environments, but you're substituting them with technologies that are underpinned by electricity.
Let me give you some examples. The differences in the systems we modelled were fairly small between the net pen and the marine-based bag systems that were trialed in British Columbia, largely because the electricity required only had to move water a very short distance. It only had to lift water from outside the pen into the pen. Those systems turned out to be similar in terms of total energy input, total greenhouse gases, etc., but when you moved to land, using the existing technologies that were in Cedar, B.C., the energy input went up markedly.
To put this into context, I actually have notes here on the greenhouse gas emissions. Compared to the in-water net-pen system, the flow-through system had five times the total energy requirements and greenhouse gas emissions. When we looked at the recirculating system, I think the total energy and greenhouse gas emissions were approximately 10 times higher.
In part, however, the higher greenhouse gas emissions associated with the Nova Scotia culture system occurred because Nova Scotia electricity is about 80% coal-fired, whereas in British Columbia about 90% of electricity is provided through hydroelectricity, so the major source of these differences, when you look across the systems, is the much greater amount of energy required to pump water and to provide oxygen and filtration and other inputs to maintain high water quality. In the case of a land-based system, it is the fossil energy inputs needed in Nova Scotia to maintain the thermal regime of the culture environment. It gets cold in Nova Scotia, and in winter you have to heat the warehouses to keep the fish alive, or at least feeding at a rate that makes them economically successful.
Simply put, while isolating salmon from the aquatic environment may provide benefits in terms of reducing local ecological interactions, it also means that many of the ecosystem services, in terms of oxygen provision, waste elimination, and maintenance of a reasonable thermal regime, are diminished or lost and have to be substituted for through technologies.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't pursue larger-scale trials with land-based or closed-containment technologies. We just have to understand that in the pursuit of local-scale environmental and ecological improvements, we may be trading off contributions to global-scale concerns.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Dr. Tyedmers, I'll have to interrupt you. I'm sorry, but e're running out of time, and the members have....
4:05 p.m.
Associate Professor, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University
I'm sorry, of course. I just didn't hear the beeping.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
4:05 p.m.
Associate Professor, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University
I apologize. I didn't realize that I had rambled.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll lead off with a question to Dr. Tyedmers.
As a natural resource or ecological economist, you said that one of your specialties or focuses is the flow of energy within food systems. Would you agree that in salmon production, based on the analysis of feed conversion ratios, you actually gain a significant advantage over other food production systems, such as the beef or poultry industries? Would you dispute--my numbers could be a little bit off here--that you need about five or six or maybe even eight kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef? In the salmon industry, it's almost a 1:1 ratio. In fact, it takes about 1.25 to 1.5 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of salmon. Is that true?
4:05 p.m.
Associate Professor, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University
Coarsely speaking, if you're just looking at the feed required to grow a certain biomass of fish, in salmon aquaculture net-pen systems it's around 1.3 kilograms. Sometimes they do better. Sometimes, when things go badly, it's higher.
My recollection on beef productions is like yours. It's much higher. There are different reasons for that, but I would caution you against using a feed-to-growth ratio as a hard measure of overall ecological performance, because the diets are very different in these animals. For example, the moisture content--colleagues who may be speaking to you later might have a better sense of this--in a concentrated pellet feed might only be in the single digits, whereas the roughage and silage you feed to cattle have a much higher moisture content. You're trading off a lot of water in one case for a concentrated, high-nutrition, high-density feed. It is a poor measure of efficiency. These animals are also completely different, in that warm-blooded animals have to maintain their temperatures above background; fish don't.
Let me get to your core question on whether farmed salmon systems are higher-performing systems in terms of efficiency. You always have to think about what you are measuring when you talk about efficiency. If it's in terms of industrial energy inputs, then yes, they are a higher-performing system than terrestrial livestock, cattle in particular, but they are not so much better than chicken. Chicken is actually a very high-performance system that is very comparable to farmed salmon. If you are talking about greenhouse gas emissions, farmed salmon production is again much higher-performing than beef. Roughly speaking, let's put it in this way: if you produce a tonne of farmed salmon, you release, from a life-cycle perspective, about two tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. It's about 10 to 14 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent for beef.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
I don't mean to interrupt, but time tight, as you can imagine.
You introduced a pretty important concept: how we look at variables that impact this industry. Of course, I'm not here to lead, but I note that the amount of animal protein in fish feeds is relatively small compared to that in the feedstocks of other farm animals. I think that's a fair comment.
4:10 p.m.
Associate Professor, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University
I think it's inverted. The amount of animal-derived protein in a farmed salmon diet, although it doesn't have to be this high, tends to be much higher than the amount of animal-derived protein that ends up going into a typical swine or dairy system.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
On this issue of where we can actually look at this, the rubber has to hit the road somewhere. Where can this committee go and study a closed-loop aquaculture system in Canada, either land-based or marine-based? Where can we go to look at one? The case has been made here by others that the economics are very sound. Where can we go to see one of these in Canada, or if not in Canada, in the world?