Stepping up a gear
17 January 2023
The past year has been Ace Aquatec’s busiest to date, with the full commercialisation of our humane stunning technology, and continued advances in our pioneering R&D work.
To develop the next stage of our sea lice system – a welfare focused process that uses electricity and water jets - we secured a European Innovation Council accelerator grant of 1.2 million euros. This will enable new tests with small batches of salmon, first in Canada, and then in Norway and Scotland, where we carried out the initial pilot, pre-Covid.
Another grant, from Innovate UK, will help our R&D team make further progress with the Ace Aquatec biomass system. The focus will be on creating a 360-degree camera that allows us to maximise the amount of data we can capture, taking fish biomass measurements to the next level.
Once built, the system will be tested in tanks at our Dundee headquarters, then we will start to layer in different algorithms to identify certain features, from maturation to wound detection. Later in the 22-month project, the camera will be trialled at farm sites.
What we learn from this research we can then apply to our standard biomass camera, which is now being launched on to the market in the first half of 2023, following extensive trials in Scotland. We have customers already lined up, principally in Scotland but also in New Zealand, and we are about to begin production at a Dundee based manufacturer for the first 15 units.
Our other major achievement this year has been rolling out the Ace Aquatec in-water electric stunner to a global market. There are now 42 systems in place, from our trial partner Scottish Sea Farms in Scotland, which now has five stunners installed in its salmon processing plants, to the world’s biggest tilapia producer, Regal Springs, which has three units.
Our customers are seeing improvements in the welfare and quality of their fish and also an increase in the throughput, with twice as much tonnage in half the time.
To cap the commercial success, Ace Aquatec’s ground-breaking work on humane slaughter was recognised with an Aquaculture UK award for animal welfare, shared with the University of Stirling, and presented in Aviemore in May.
As we have scaled up, production of the stunners has moved to a new UK based manufacturer, and we now have a network of international distributors, from the US to Australasia, so people can observe the system in action wherever they are in the world.
A newer development, Ace Aquatec’s smolt stunner, which removes chemicals from culling and reduces fish waste, has so far made an impact in Norway as well as Scotland. Next up is a completely new stunning system, to be unveiled at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston in March.
In other areas of the business, the market for our FaunaGuard acoustic offering has doubled in the past 12 months, particularly in the North Sea, where the proliferation of wind turbines requires mitigation measures to prevent negative interactions with wildlife.
With so much going on, Ace Aquatec’s fast expanding team has been much in demand, delivering presentations from Canada to Spain to the EU. Next year we will all be moving up another gear, in order to fulfil both our burgeoning sales commitments and our exciting innovation programme.
- Nathan Pyne-Carter
