Sure. We actually were net cage farmers—we grew chinook salmon on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island for quite a few years—and ended up losing our farms because of several significant losses of fish due to uncontrolled plankton blooms in the area.
We wanted to stay in the salmon farming business, but we didn't want to keep losing fish, so we were looking around. At the same time, the B.C. government had a program that invited salmon farming companies to look at ways of.... There was a moratorium on new licences at the time, so the B.C. government said, “Okay, if you guys can show us some new methods to grow salmon that don't involve net cages, we'll give you some licences.”
So of course we jumped on that. We got involved with the Cedar facility, which was a pre-existing, land-based, flow-through system. It had eight tanks of 750 cubic metres apiece that we grew salmon in. We learned an awful lot from it, but we recognized that the economics were silly. It didn't make any sense—there were 175-horsepower engines to push water 40 feet ahead. It was just kind of an absurd situation, even though the fish did very, very well in the closed system.
We took what we learned from there and thought that maybe we could reduce the energy costs by putting it in water. So on paper we designed a system large enough to be commercially viable, with an energy footprint that was really limited. Once you're at the same level in the water, you're just moving water laterally, so your energy costs are really low. We went from a system that had eight tanks of 750 cubic metres to our current system now of one tank that's 3,000 cubic metres. We move water through there once an hour using two 15-horsepower motors, and we're running at about a third of their capacity—so we're using roughly 10- or 12-horsepower to move that much water through that system. That demonstrated to us that there were a lot of possibilities in closed systems in the water.
Mary Ellen pointed out that our system is a flow-through system, and that's true. We pump water from depth to go through the system. We take the solids out and put the rest of the water back into the ocean. It's not a true closed system, certainly not a RAS system—a recirculating aquaculture system—but I think it addresses so many of the current issues in farming that it's well worth looking at.
What's interesting, too, is that we also got involved in this industry from an environmental perspective. We wanted to protect our fish from external environmental issues, but it's also a farm management issue. We felt we could really reduce our overall costs if we kept our fish healthy and grew them at higher densities at a lower footprint. Certainly, on a modelling basis, we're equivalent to the current net cage industry costs. I think that's an important factor to think about.
Certainly, upfront capital costs are somewhat higher. We've moved in a very good direction regarding that: we've reduced our capital costs down—by about a third since we started this process—and we'll continue to do that as well. I think we have a very good system that will continue to improve—one I hope the industry considers.