Fisheries Committee on Nov. 22nd, 2011

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

Of course, I truly hope that the Cohen commission--and we're going to leave it to the Cohen commission--will have some statements on whether the regulations are proper or not in terms of the fish farming and the open net concept.

How much involvement does the Government of Canada have, financially and otherwise, in your pilot project?

[Eric Hobson]

So far it's not a lot of money. They were involved in the feasibility study. This is DFO I'm talking about specifically.

We applied and we are successful applicants for some more money, but that application has not yet been announced, so I'm not at liberty to say how that is going.

I think overall DFO has been very supportive of what we're doing in closed containment. We have a very good relationship with the people in Ottawa. We have a good relationship with the Pacific region people in Vancouver. I think they know in their heart of hearts, if you like, that something has to happen with these open net cages. That can't be a very nice thing to do, when you get up in the morning, to try to defend yourself against all the problems that those things have caused.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

Did you have much involvement with the Freshwater Institute in West Virginia?

[Eric Hobson]

The Freshwater Institute has been seconded, if you like, into this project. Tides Canada, quite separately from the closed containment facility that we just talked about, has funded some research programs at the Freshwater Institute. And part of their contract is that the Freshwater Institute provides their advice to the 'Namgis project. We have basically the world experts on closed containment RAS technology sitting in the same room as the project team, which to me is an enormous advantage.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

Also--

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Mr. MacAulay, sorry, your time has expired again.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

There we go again. He cut me off.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. Donnelly.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Hobson, you mentioned a “ticking time bomb” when you talked about pathogens connected with open net aquaculture. You were hesitant about giving any kind of a timeframe, but I wonder if I could push a little bit to see if you think there is essentially a timeframe, if you look back to the beginning of aquaculture in British Columbia on the west coast, anyway, and looking forward. We've heard from aquaculture companies that are talking about or thinking about expansion of open net.

If that was the case, if there was significant expansion on both west and east coasts, do you think there is an inevitability within a certain timeframe? You may not want to hazard a guess, but I'm going to try to push to see if you could hazard a guess about just how long it will be before that industry runs into some significant problems, as mentioned earlier--the sitings of Chile and the problems they've had.

[Eric Hobson]

Well, a ticking time bomb may have already gone off if this ISA virus is in fact loose in the north Pacific.

If I roll back the clock to before ISA was detected in B.C., I would have said there might be a five-year window of opportunity, maybe up to a ten-year window, without any expansion, better regulation, where you could then develop an alternative. But I'm not sure we have the time anymore. I think the pathogens are ahead of us in this game.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you.

You're obviously a fan of this technology of RAS or closed system technology. Again, in your opinion, how long do you think it would take to convert the industry—I'll just keep it to the west coast—to closed containment? If the industry were to go in this direction, how many years do you think it would take to convert from open net to closed containment, if there was significant political will to make that happen?

[Eric Hobson]

I would say, realistically, that to create the same volume of product that is currently produced--about 80,000 tonnes a year of farmed salmon in B.C.--that's probably a ten-year process from today. So that's from the start, basically, of the pilot project through to the point where we can have basically fifty 1,500-tonne farms in British Columbia. I'm sure there are fifty suitable sites. I haven't personally gone to look for them, but there appear to be lots of good farm sites.

So I'd say in ten years we could replace this business.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you.

Chief Cranmer, I'd like to switch back to you for a second. I know the question was brought up earlier about what the receptivity has been to the pilot project and your initiative to go to closed containment. Can you elaborate on how the community has responded to your interest in closed containment? How have other first nations in the province of British Columbia responded to your initiative?

[Chief William Cranmer]

Well, right from the start, when we started talking about closed containment, we were having regular community meetings in our village. Eric and some of the technical staff were present at the meetings to answer any questions. They were supportive of the project, especially given their fear of the open net fish farms.

There has been interest from other first nations, not only in our language group, which is from Campbell River to the northern end of Vancouver Island; even to the west coast of Vancouver Island there are first nations interested in this closed containment system.

So there is an interest.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Allen.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Chief and Mr. Hobson, thank you for being with us today.

I just have a few questions. In the module in the final design, you're going to go from 260 metric tonnes to 390 metric tonnes. That design is a covered bio-secure facility, which is about three-quarters of an acre in size, about 2,900 square metres.

Do you anticipate that a facility of this size would be able to be ratcheted up to the 1,000 metric tonnes commercial, or do you figure that this size—the footprint—is going to have to be a little bit bigger for the commercial 1,000 metric tonne production?

[Eric Hobson]

I think the concept is actually to build these modules side by side, if you want to expand the facility to commercial size. So this is a commercially sized module that gets cheaper as you make it bigger, because you get the economies of scale as a result.

The module itself is designed, as I said, so that if you put stocking density at 50 kilograms per cubic metre of fish in the tanks, you get about 260 metric tonnes of production. You can go up to 75 kilograms per cubic metre. That gets you to the 390 metric tonnes.

The Freshwater Institute has grown Atlantic salmon to full size in their facility in West Virginia at over 100 kilograms per cubic metre, so theoretically, maybe you could get 500 metric tonnes per year out of this single module. That means, to get to 1,000, you'd only need to build one more. I don't know realistically whether the number is 300, 400, or 500, and that would determine how many modules you'd want to build to go to 1,000 metric tonnes.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

So basically you would have to scale up a little bit or add modules, which means you're going to be over an acre or so to get 1,000 metric tonnes of production. That means to move all of B.C's production on the land, you would have to have about 80,000 acres to be able to do that. Is that correct?

[Eric Hobson]

No, I don't think so. The number I've seen is 140 hectares of space to replace that. It's 80,000 tonnes, and if this all fits on, let's say, even five acres for 1,000 tonnes--

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

You would have to square that circle for me.

[Eric Hobson]

--five acres times 80 is 400 acres.

Does that sound like 400 acres...? It's something like that.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

It doesn't sound like it to me.

You said you have lots of parcels of land. What is the requirement for groundwater? How much groundwater is required for this? I see you have some statistics in your package here that talk about the effluent water being 1,000 litres per minute, and then potentially up to 3,000 to 10,000 litres per minute.

What is the amount of groundwater you require? I just wonder how many other parcels of land you can get that are like this one, close to estuaries.

[Eric Hobson]

The module is designed for the 260 metric tonnes using a 20% discharge per day. That's the 1,000 litres per minute of groundwater that you need to make up that discharge amount. That's actually not a very large volume. I'm trying to put it in terms of maybe a four-inch pipe with a flow of water coming out from it; that would be 1,000 litres per minute. So it sounds like a big number., but I don't think it actually is a big number.

Again, SDTC, when we applied, asked exactly that same question. We did some work on it by looking at sites where there were aquifers similar to what the ‘Namgis aquifer has. We looked right across Canada and there appeared to be many, many sites available.

For example, hatcheries like the Gwa'ni hatchery that Chief Cranmer talked about are almost all flow-through hatcheries, so they move considerably more groundwater through them than 1,000 litres per minute. In fact, the Gwa'ni hatchery moves 16,000 litres per minute through its facility because it's a flow-through facility. That comes from groundwater as well.

There are in Canada about 450 land-based aquaculture sites in existence already. That's a combination of hatcheries, trout farms, and other species that are being grown. But they're not grown with RAS for the most part; they're grown with flow-through.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Kamp.