Green light for land-based leviathan
A huge land-based farm that will produce both market-sized salmonids and juvenile fish has been given planing permission.
The facility, run by Akvafarm Rjukan, could create 60 new jobs in Telemark county and cover an area of 33,000 m2. It is expected to produce about 8,000 tonnes of trout and salmon a year – divided between 2.4 million juveniles and up to 4,550 tonnes of market-sized fish.
“We expect to stock our first fish in the third quarter of 2018,” Carl Ivar Holmen, Chairman of Akvafarm Rjukan, told kyst.no.
The plant will be built in Tinn in Telemark, and Holmen has previously said that what makes the plant unique is access to its own water as well as heat from nearby industries. Now he is glad that the formal permission is in place.
“As we have obtained permission to both juveniles and farming production this gives us some flexibility in what we want to produce, but the objective is to produce harvest-size salmon in freshwater. The fact that we will be using freshwater in the whole production cycle makes the facility different from others,” Holmen adds, “…and this flexibility allows us to produce both salmon and trout.”
The permit is equivalent to 14 licences of 325 tonne MTB.
“This is awesome for Telemark. The establishment of such a full-scale plant can provide up to 60 new jobs,” Rita Regbo, of the local county council, told kyst.no.
Krüger Kaldnes will deliver the RAS technology for the farm.
