Thank you. I'll edit my prepared statement as I go.
Thank you again for allowing me to speak to the committee. My name is Rob Walker, and I am representing AgriMarine Industries, based in Campbell River, B.C. We have an office in Vancouver as well.
I am going to give you a quick history of AgriMarine, because I feel it's pertinent.
AgriMarine Industries started as a net cage farm in Kyuquot Sound on northwest Vancouver Island. We grew chinook salmon in nets, had lots of experience with algae blooms, and ended up losing our farms because we couldn't keep up with the mortality. That pushed us into looking at new ways of farming back then. We wanted to be farmers, but we were tired of losing money.
In 1999 or 2000, the B.C. government came up with its green technologies initiative, which provided us with an opportunity to have a look at the pre-existing land-based system at Cedar, just south of Nanaimo. It had failed a number of times prior to our getting in there, but they allowed us to crank it up again, test the systems, and examine the costs and husbandry as well.
We quickly learned that the energy consumption at the farm made it very difficult to be profitable. The farm required a flow-through of 10,000 U.S. gallons a minute, and that required a 200-horsepower pump to move that water. There was a substantial head there. For those who don't know, this farm is constructed of above-ground concrete tanks, a series of eight of them, and the pumping head was about 40 feet at times. We also discovered that levels of dissolved oxygen in the local water were really variable. We spent a lot of money on liquid oxygen. From a fish husbandry perspective, we were able to learn plenty.
Salmon actually thrive in closed environments provided the basics are there, such as the right level of oxygen, flowing water, waste removal, feed, etc. We were able to develop a lot of real-time monitoring systems, which helped us keep that environment stable.
It became apparent very quickly that cost-wise, the flow-through model was not efficient. We looked at what we could do and ended up with a marine concept. We used the flow-through model again, but we put it at sea level, which allowed us to essentially get rid of the cost of pumping. We just moved water side to side, as someone else mentioned earlier.
We looked at the structural innovation from a couple of perspectives. The first one, of course, is environmental. Our reasoning was that solid wall containers prevented escapes and marine mammal interactions. Avian interactions could be limited easily with bird nets. Waste capture was enabled by the collection of feces and feed in the bottom and limited interaction with finfish, and the containment of feces from the farm would reduce pathogen transfer and eutrophication and also eliminate any buildup of waste on the sea floor under the pens.
The second perspective was just general farm management. Fish require just the right amount of water and quality of feed and oxygen and so on, just like any other animal. You manage inputs and get the right outputs. Obviously you can't manage what you can't control, and when we looked at our net-cage experience, we realized we were subject to the whims of nature, such as algae blooms. We never had the jellyfish swarms that the southern Pacific has had; those are pretty horrible. Low-dissolved-oxygen events were another one we knew we could avoid. Solid wall systems obviously help us control all those external systems.
As another alternative, the land-based systems can be either freshwater or sea water. It's our belief that the sea water systems need to be parked next to the sea, but the B.C. coast isn't generally amenable to providing hectares of waterfront, particularly to a public that is antipathetic, I think, to the industry as it is, and there are certainly lots of NIMBY--not in my backyard--folks. The freshwater land-based systems could be located almost anywhere, and we felt that if the industry wanted to grow using that system, the industry would likely move to the larger markets such as New York and Los Angeles, and move away from B.C.
We're trying to keep an industry here in B.C.
We feel that the ocean is a very solid resource that we must work with respectfully, so the intentional design of a system that uses the sea without abusing it would provide us with technology that would allow our industry to flourish. We designed our system--a solid-wall closed containment system and marine-based, as I mentioned--with commercial scalability in mind. That's really key, comparing it to other systems that we've seen.
We looked at a number of materials, dimensions of tanks, pumping oxygenation, and the various technologies that help this system run, and while mooring remains site-specific generally, we determined that a vacuum-infused fibreglass structure, fabricated in sections for ease of transport, would provide us with the asset life we were after. We found high-efficiency pumps and oxygen-generation systems as well, so we've reduced our energy consumption in our modelling.
I'll make a quick mention of some of the financial support, because I'm obligated to. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco and the Sustainable Development Technology Canada group worked with us, and our associated company, the Middle Bay Sustainable Aquaculture Institute, helped us move from our concept to implementation.
You have some pictures in front of you, and I've already discussed Cedar. You can have a look at those. We've also launched our first tank in a reservoir in Benxi in China. That tank design is designed for the reservoir environment. It's not as rigorous a tank as we'll be installing in Middle Bay later this year, but you can see from the pictures that the concept is there. It's solid. It sits nicely within the walkway framework and so on.
We're rearing rainbow trout there currently, and we'll also rear chinook salmon. The second tank should be operational by the end of this week, and by the end of the year we'll likely have another six tanks in the water there. You folks were talking about regulatory environments earlier. It took us about three months from setting foot in China to the time we had full permission and a site available to us in China. It's about three years for the same process in British Columbia, so that's an important point to mention.
I believe one of your members mentioned the weather characteristics of our country, and that's one of the nice things. We have lots of cold water in the winter. Our tanks are designed to draw water from the depths, so we stabilize water temperatures. Particularly in freshwater systems, of course, we can draw from the thermocline and have a rearing environment that is available to fish all year round.