What price does diesel need to reach before Recirculating Aquaculture Systems become the preferred approach compared to growing fish in cages moored in the open ocean?

Common wisdom is that the only viable future option for producing large volumes of fish is through open ocean aquaculture in large sea cages.

However, the recent increase in fuel prices may cause a major shift in economics that leads to a fundamental rethinking of this assumption.

Lets think through and compare the features of recirculating aquaculture systems with the open ocen aquaculture to help provide a focus for our consideration.

First, lets identify what we are talking about. Recirculating Aquaculture Systems or RAS uses one or more indoor tanks within a controllable rearing environment to grow fish.

Recirculating systems seek to offer the fish a clean growth environment by filtering and cleaning the water for recycling back through the tanks. Typically RAS systems stock fish at high densities as a means of enhancing the economics due to the expectation of a higher capital cost required to establish a recirculating aquaculture operation compared to ponds or cages in existing waterways.

The features of Recirculating Aquaculture systems potentially include:

1. minimise water requirements
2. minimise land requirements
3. minimise variability
4. control water temperature
5. species selection enabled
6. independent of weather
7. control water quality
8. minimise transport costs
9. year round production
10. optimise harvest to meet market conditions

Therefore, potentially we are comparing scenarios like:

• an open ocean aquaculture facility in a clean environment but due to increased environmental constraints operating further from shore requiring a round trip by boat over some kilometres each day to service the maintenance and upkeep needs of the operation. Processing may be conducted some distance from market and then transported to wholesaler requiring flights and trucking for delivery

with one like this

• a recirculating aquaculture system located within a large city market operating from a repurposed industrial site producing fish just in time to meet demand from the fish marketers headquartered in the next suburb.

Can you help me to identify the key issues that we must consider in contructing an economic model?

Are there already economic models that exist that can help us to balance the pros and cons of each scenario?

There is one paper on RAS available for download here, but it is not comparative and does not treat the transport issues. Is anyone aware of any work that is more recent?

Perhaps such models already exist for chicken and or pork producers?

Any leads, opinions, insights or suggestions gratefully received.

Innovation guru Scott Anthony recently shared some insights on his blog regarding change and innovation.

He indicated that six key points that seemed to be in common:

• The need for a crisis or some kind of “burning platform” to motivate transformational change
• A clear vision and strategy … that allows room for iteration
• A recognition that transformation is a multi-year journey
• A need to put the customer or consumer in the center of the transformation equation
• The critical importance of demonstrating to skeptics that different actions can lead to different results
• The need to over-communicate to employees, customers, stakeholders, and shareholders

So, whilst Scott’s comments were developed in the context of large corporate innovation in a US context, I think these insights are also important for our desire to identify and introduce productivity transforming innovations in aquaculture.

I think we may have a burning platform!

What do you think about the rest of his points?

If you would like to take a look at Scott’s post please click on this link.