OVERVIEW
MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
POSSIBILITIES
CAPITALS
ACTIVITIES
ACTORS
BURGESS
Technology | ||
|
Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
|
The Vikings are coming ... One Scandinavian firm’s plans to build ‘Fish City’ in the Middle East
CEO Lukas Havn, middle, holds an incorporation certificate for the Abu Dhabi Global Markets. The company is now poised to expand its business within the Middle East. Photo credit: Vikings Label Lukas Havn has a specific vision for the future of aquaculture. As the CEO of Vikings Label, Havn envisions what he calls “Fish City” – a 50,000-ton RAS compound sustainably producing locally-consumed fish species in the middle of a desert. The project will also include a research center, education center, a feed mill and an algae plant. The first step of this three-year construction plan is set to begin this October with a 5,000-ton salmon RAS facility worth US$100 million. Havn says his team is looking Oman or in Saudi Arabia for the build. Both are ideal for its close proximity to the company’s Dubai headquarters, where it has been importing Norwegian salmon and other fish species since 2016. RAStech sat down with Havn about his company’s plans to bring Scandinavian innovation to the aquaculture market in the Middle East. RAStech: What is your overall vision for Fish City? Lukas Havn: I really hope it would be like the heart of modern aquaculture, not just in this region but if you take the centre of the world, Middle East is pretty much the center. We want this to be the start of a sustainable industry that can grow into anything. It can grow into vertical farming, into massive research centers, education centers. We want to build up a life around it. We want to have people actually living there and establish a life; a fully integrated and sustainable village. RAStech: How has the pandemic affected the project’s progression? LH: The engineering team is in Norway and Denmark at the moment. They’re keeping up with the development of the technology remotely. We’re working with engineers here to develop the structure itself in Dubai. We’ve also had good progress on the sites, getting maps and getting reports of the water qualities. I even had a guy in Oman that was helpful enough to drive around and send me a live video. We used to have a target of starting construction in October this year. For now, we’re keeping that target. We’re also not fully funded yet but we’re getting there. RAStech: What unique challenges do you face to make this build possible? LH: There’s no issues building in the Middle East compared to anywhere else. Rather, I think there are some advantages. In the beginning, it all started because the market is massive and it’s growing. And when it comes to water, the temperature is not an issue at all. It consumes a lot of electricity to cool it and that’s about it. And we need much thicker insulation to keep the cooling inside. So we had to look at really smart systems that will manage the environment efficiently. That’s why we have chosen plots where we can go pretty deep, where there’s a lower average temperature. We’re going deep into the ocean and we’ll pump directly into the facility. For the freshwater fish, we will use wells. For saltwater, we’ll use ocean saltwater. It’s actually going to be 90 percent ocean water. We are also looking into wind energy but the solid plan right now, is to adapt solar. We’re going to use as much solar as possible. We have looked at all the best solutions we could find before we look at how much it costs. We decided that we need a facility that’s going to be the best in the world and it costs what it costs, so we’ve been looking at it from that angle. RAStech: How has the government played a role in choosing the perfect site? LH: Especially in Oman, they are supporting us beyond what we would expect. The reason we actually ended up looking at Oman as an option is because the government brought us there. They laid out everything; how we could cooperate with lands, facilitating the project. They’re very flexible. It gives us a very straight path to building. We don’t have to go through many hurdles to get to the construction stage. In Saudi, it’s the same. They have been helpful. It’s a bit more complicated, a bit more politics. But both of these countries have very clear targets in increasing their aquaculture production. And both have gone public with their targets, so that’s also one of the reasons. RAStech: What’s the feedback from the local community? LH: We always get the same questions and a little bit of skepticism about the hot temperatures, and things like that. But nothing negative. Just mostly excitement, especially because we are working on bringing in the locals, to work on the project, train them and make them a part of it. People really stand behind the government here. If the government says they want to increase aquaculture production, they get excited. They want to create a new economy in the country. ---------------------------------------- COVID-19 Updates August 18, 2020 Chinese tilapia exports hit hard by Covid-19 August 11, 2020 Cold Lake Fish Hatchery gets $10M RAS, infrastructure upgrade July 14, 2020 UK prawn RAS farms pivot to meet post-pandemic demand Editor’s Picks New York steelhead trout RAS farm ready for expansion Show me the money RAS Talk: Made in Maine From lakes to land Made in Maine Digital Edition View Digital Edition Archives Subscription Centre ---------------------------------------- Peter Burgess to Lawrence, Gustavo, Jerome, Lehr, Peter, Naomi, Pamela, Dave, Lynn Thank you Gustavo ... staying up to date with the many things that are going on is a huge challenge. I think my take on the Middle East, and indeed many other parts of the world, is very different from a lot of other people and a function of my world view and interest in history, geography and world affairs since I was a young schoolboy. One of the things that has bothered me for decades has been the foundational inefficiency of the United States compared to the rest of the world. The level of consumption and waste at every stage of the product life cycle is far worse in the United States than any other country. If I am wrong on this, I would like to be corrected with chapter and verse. The American economy is profitable, but at the expense of society and the environment ... and probably, taking all these issues into consideration, the worst in the world. It has concerned me over the past 40 years that many countries have seen their populations get a massively improved standard of living and quality of life while for most people in the United States household wealth and quality of life has deteriorated substantially. While in the aggregate the United States may be the biggest economy on planet earth, the majority of Americans have gone backwards over the past several decades. Corporate profitability of the United States has not been built on either a sustainable society or a sustainable environment. I have done assignments in most of the countries in the Middle East in the dim and distant past. I remember one piece of data from Kuwait in the early 1980s. A gallon of gas was priced at 10 cents while a gallon of water was priced at one dollar ($1). This was a good reflection of the economics of gas and water then and now. Less than a decade after the 1973 oil shock, the Kuwaitees that were related to the ruling family were immensely rich and ordinary Kuwaities as well were paid a lot for doing little. All the real work in the economy was done by foreigners from top level professionals to bottom level laborers of all sorts. The 'progress' of places around the Middle East since then has been remarkable, but the work structure has not changed very much. Depending on how one understands the concept of sustainability, RAS technology for fish production probably improves the sustainability of most places in the Middle East quite substantially especially since fishing in the (Arab / Persian) Gulf and the Red Sea has been a very important part of the regional economy for centuries. There are many other examples of really substantial socio-economic progress around the world ... yet progress for most Americans in America has been tepid at best during the period since the 1973 oil shock. Maybe there is a way in which The Alliance Partnership and RAS projects can be helpful in changing the trajectory ... one hopes so, Best PeterB _____________________________ Peter Burgess ... Founder and CEO TrueValueMetrics ... Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society True Value Impact Accounting ... Multi Dimension for ALL the Capitals http://www.truevaluemetrics.org LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/peterburgess1/ Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/PeterBurgess2/ Twitter: @truevaluemetric @peterbnyc Telephone: 570 202 1739 Email: peterbnyc@gmail.com Skype: peterbinbushkill ---------------------------------------- On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 9:07 AM Lawrence S. White 'There’s no issues building in the Middle East compared to anywhere else. Rather, I think there are some advantages. In the beginning, it all started because the market is massive and it’s growing. And when it comes to water, the temperature is not an issue at all. It consumes a lot of electricity to cool it and that’s about it.'No problem burning massive amounts of fossil fuel to keep the fish cool, because there’s so much oil here. Doesn’t sound very sustainable to me. ---------------------------------------- On Aug 18, 2020, at 11:14 PM, Gustavo Salazar Please check this article https://www.rastechmagazine.com/the-vikings-are-coming/ Gustavo Salazar
By Jean Ko Din
| August 18, 2020 The text being discussed is available at | https://www.rastechmagazine.com/the-vikings-are-coming/ and |