Session: 12-01-01 Blue Economy I

Submission Number: 157093

Overall Risk Perspective for Ocean Aquaculture 

INTRODUCTION

Oceans space offers a vast opportunity to meet marine protein demand with sustainable, safe and efficient fish farming, but how do we maintain safety of asset, personnel and prevent fish escape together with maintaining fish welfare and reducing emissions? Adding safety to fish farming operations is mainly ensured by providing uniformity, transparency, and predictability and thereby securing the total safety performance. This paper reflects and address overall risk perspectives combined with applicable taxonomy of essential risk items crucial for maintaining safe aquaculture operations in ocean space.

MAIN APPROACH

The main areas of concern when it comes to ensuring safe and reliable fish farming units may be categories into: Asset integrity, personnel safety, fish welfare and prevention of fish escape. An integrated risk methodology based on these four items results in a cost-efficient approach to reduce operational risk and establish sufficient safety level.

Asset integrity includes structural strength, stability, mooring, technical arrangement, and solutions on board together with reliability of essential equipment installed. Integrity of vessel or installation itself is achieved by utilizing existing scheme for certification of maritime installations.
Personnel safety is mainly addressing arrangement for emergency escape and fire safety. Maintaining Health, Safety and Environment for personnel working on board a fish farming installation is demanding since challenging task are performed daily in hash, marine environment. Special considerations need to be taken due to offshore/maritime operational mode.  Safe maritime personnel logistics ensuring reliable transfer of people on- and off the fish farm is of the essence.
Fish welfare and requirements related to this varies significantly depending on local authorities. It is essential to verify the reliability of technology utilized to monitor environment of the fish. Instrumentation indicating oxygen level, temperature, salinity, turbidity is subject for special attention.
Ocean health: A significant risk in ocean aquaculture is substandard sustainability due to emissions from fish farming installation. It is considered essential to monitor and limit pollution from e.g. fish waste, feed surplus, chemical substances from net cleaning and emissions from medical treatment of feed stock. This to ensure that environmental impact of fish farming operation does not exceed the sustainability limits of marine environment. Sustainable aqua operation is mainly achieved through monitoring performance and ensuring that biodiversity targets for marine environment are reached.

Fish control or prevention of escape is the main function of a fish farming unit. Structural integrity of net system and ropes together with capability of fish transfer systems are crucial items in fish control. In addition to arrangement representing physical barriers preventing the fish to escape, all other systems and components that may cause fish escape if they fail or malfunction in any way need to be certified.

CONCLUSION

Combining the well-known certification concept from maritime industry with balanced aquaculture-based requirements for fish welfare and biodiversity provides a robust and cost-efficient solutions to reducing risk in operation of ocean fish farming installations.

Presenting Author: Per Arild Aland DNV

Presenting Author Biography: Per Arild Åland works with DNV service- and business development related to emerging technology/solutions in the rapidly growing ocean space segment – specializing in aquaculture. He has close to 30 rewarding years of experience in maritime and offshore industry. He has contributed in a number of different roles ranging from senior principal engineer, auditor and head of section within various fields including offshore technology, business development, technology qualification and management. Recent years have been dedicated to ocean space technology with special focus on offshore aquaculture.