3.5 Scalability Challenges in RAS
RAS are capital-intensive operations, requiring high funding expenditure on equipment, infrastructure, influent and effluent treatment systems, engineering, construction and management. Once the RAS farm is built, working capital is also needed until harvests and successful sales are achieved. Operational expenditures are also substantial and are mostly comprised of fixed costs such as rent, interest on loans, depreciation and variable costs such as fish feed, seed (fingerlings or eggs), labour, electricity, technical oxygen, pH buffers, electricity, sales/marketing, maintenance costs, etc.
When comparing productivity and economics, RAS will invariably compete with other forms of fish production and even other sources of protein production for human consumption. This competition is likely to exert a downwards pressure on the sale price of fish, which in turn must be high enough to make a RAS business profitable. As in other forms of aquaculture production, reaching higher economies of scale is generally a way to reduce the cost of production and thus obtain access to markets. Some examples of reduction in costs of production that can be achieved with larger facilities are:
Reduced transportation costs on bulk orders of feed, chemicals, oxygen.
Discounts on the purchase of larger quantities of equipment.
Access to industrial electricity rates.
Automation of farm processes such as process monitoring and control, feeding,harvesting, slaughter and processing.
Maximization of the use of labour: The same manpower was needed to take careof 10 tons of fish as was needed to take care of 100 tons of fish or more.
Following the increase of economies of scale in the net pen aquaculture sector, larger RAS are being developed on scales not considered a decade ago. The last decade has seen the construction of facilities with production capacities of thousands of tons per year, and this sheer size increase of RAS facilities is bringing new technical challenges, which are explored in the next section.
3.5.1 Hydrodynamics and Water Transport
Proper control of the hydrodynamic conditions in fish tanks is essential to ensure uniform water quality and adequate solids transport towards the tank outlets (Masaló 2008; Oca and Masalo 2012). Tanks which are not capable of flushing metabolites quickly enough will have less carrying capacity. Ensuring proper hydrodynamic performance in fish tanks is an important aquacultural engineering research topic which has helped the industry design and operate tanks of different shapes and sizes. However, increasing tank sizes used in commercial RAS are posing new engineering challenges to designers and operators. Recent investigations are underway to optimize the hydrodynamic characteristics in large octagonal tanks used for salmon smolt production (Gorle et al. 2018), by studying the effect of fish biomass, geometry and inlet and outlet structures in large tanks used in Norwegian smolt facilities. Similarly, Summerfelt et al. (2016) found a trend towards a decreasing feed loading rate per unit flow in modern tanks compared to tanks built more than a decade ago in Norwegian smolt facilities. A lowered feed burden effectively results in improved tank water quality as the recirculating water is treated at a faster rate, preventing the accumulation of metabolites and the depletion of oxygen in the tank even further compared to older tanks which operated at higher feed burdens. Future work will likely provide more information on the hydrodynamics of tanks with more than 1000 msup3/sup in volume. Other examples of enormous tanks which are currently being used are the tanks used in the RAS 2020 systems (Kruger, Denmark) or the Niri concept (Niri, Norway). Adoption of these new concepts using larger tanks will play a vital role in their profitability, as long as proper hydrodynamic conditions are achieved.
3.5.2 Stock Loss Risk
In RAS, the intensive rearing conditions can lead to sudden and catastrophic loss of fish if the system fails. Sources of system failure may include mechanical failure of pumping systems and RAS equipment, power outages, loss of oxygenation/aeration systems, hydrogen sulphide build-up and release, operational accidents and more. These risks and solutions to them need to be identified and incorporated into operational procedures.
The increasing size of RAS operations may also mean an increased risk of financial loss if catastrophic loss of fish occurs. On the other hand, risk-mitigation measures and system redundancy may also increase the cost of a RAS project and thus, designers and engineers must strike a balance between these elements.
Aside from industry and media reports, little academic research has been done on the risk of commercial RAS ventures. Badiola et al. (2012) surveyed RAS farms and analysed the main technical issues, finding that poor system design, water quality problems and mechanical problems were the main risk elements affecting the viability of RAS.
3.5.3 Economics
Debate on the economic viability of RAS focuses mostly on the high capital start-up costs of recirculating aquaculture farms and the long lead time before fish are ready to be marketed, as well as the perception that RAS farms have high operating costs. De Ionno et al. (2007) studied the commercial performance of RAS farms, concluding that economic viability increases with the scale of the operation. According to this study, farms smaller than 100 tons per year of production capacity are only marginally profitable in the Australian context where the study took place. Timmons and Ebeling (2010) also provide a case for achieving large economies of scale (in the order of magnitude of thousands of tons of production per year) which allow for the production cost reductions through vertical integration projects such as the inclusion of processing facilities, hatcheries or feed mills. Liu et al. (2016) studied the economic performance of a theoretical RAS farm with a capacity of 3300 tons per year, compared to a traditional net pen farm of the same capacity. At this scale the RAS operation reaches similar production costs compared to the net pen farm, but the higher capital investment doubles the payback period in comparison, even when the fish from the RAS farm are sold at a premium price. In the future, costly and strict licensing requiring good environmental performance may increase the viability of RAS as competitive option for the production of Atlantic salmon.
3.5.4 Fish Handling
On land-based farms, fish handling is often required for various reasons: to separate fish into weight classes, to reduce stocking densities, to transport fish across growing departments (i.e. from a nursery to an on-growing department) or to harvest fish when they are market ready. According to Lekang (2013), fish are handled most effectively with active methods such as fish pumps and also with passive methods such as the use of visual or chemical signals that allow the fish to move themselves from one place on the farm to the next.
Summerfeltet al. (2009) studied several means to crowd and harvest salmonids from large circular tanks using Cornell-type dual drains. Strategies included crowding fish with purse seines, clam-shell bar crowders and herding fish between tanks taking advantage to their innate avoidance response to carbon dioxide. Harvesting techniques included extracting the fish through the sidewall discharge port of a Cornell-type dual-drain tank or using an airlift to lift the crowded fish to a dewatering box. AquaMAOF (Israel) employs swimways and tanks sharing a common wall to passively transfer the fish through the farm, with harvesting taking place using a pescalator (Archimedes screw pump) at the end of a swimway. The RAS2020 concept from Kruger (Denmark) uses bar graders/crowders permanently installed in a donut-shaped or circular raceway tank to move and crowd the fish without the need for fish pumps.
Despite continuing developments on this topic, the increasing size of RAS farms will keep challenging designers and operators on how to handle fish safely, economically and without stress. The expanding range of designs, species under production and operation intensity of RAS farms may result in various and novel fish transport and harvest technologies.