Methane-eating bacteria could reduce the impact of our big appetite for fish
A California-based company has been busy working on a non-animal, non-vegetable feed for fish farms made using a bacterium called methylococcus. It may not sound like something edible but when placed in fermentation tanks and fed methane, before being spun at high speed to remove the water, it creates dried pellets that prove appetising for fish.
First developed in the 1980s, the idea has since been revisited as a potential answer to the growing demand for fish feed and fears of collapsing fish stocks.
The product, called FeedKind, is still in the pre-production stage but Calysta, the company behind it, recently secured $30m in funding from agribusiness giant Cargill to accelerate its introduction. Approved for use in Europe, a UK research and development facility in Teeside is under construction and slated to open in autumn this year. The company is aiming to get approval and build facilities in the US by 2018.
The fish farm of the future - interactive
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The World Bank predicts the farmed fish sector will provide two thirds of the fish we consume by 2030. But feed is a problem. Currently it is made with a mix of wild caught fish and fish trimmings; commodities like soy, wheat and corn; and byproducts from pork and poultry farming. These are ingredients with significant negative impacts including ocean ecosystems damage thanks to overfishing and ghost gear; soil erosion caused by pesticides and fertilisers used; and deforestation.
Calysta is not the only company looking at alternative feed options; others are developing algae- and insect-based fish meal. But reaching the scale required with algae or insects has significant challenges. A conventional feed factory (producing feed from fish byproducts or agricultural products like soy) produces up to 500,000 tonnes of fish feed per year, according to Michiel Fransen, standards and certification coordinator for the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, while companies producing insect-based fish feed produce as little as 200 tonnes annually.
Alan Shaw, CEO of Calysta, says the goal isn’t to replace conventional fish feed but to provide alternative sources of protein to supplement the fast-growing market. The company is, however, aiming to rapidly scale production. Once a US plant is in operation it estimates production at 15,000 tonnes of feed a year, and the company has a target of 200,000 tonnes by 2020.
The FeedKind process requires no agricultural land, no fertilisers or pesticides, little water and places no demand on wild caught fisheries. Because methylococcus is a living organism, just like a corn plant for example, the culture can be started from a small seed which is cheap and easy to produce. Calysta has prepared cell banks that act just like seed repositories for farmers, which allows an unlimited amount of fermentations to be run.
There is a drawback however, the production of FeedKind is reliant on access to low-cost sources of methane. In the US that has been made possible by the rapid and controversial growth of the fracking industry.
Shaw is aware of the criticisms and Calysta is exploring options for producing FeedKind with renewable sources of methane created from municipal solid waste but the current production model relies on cheap methane to be cost effective. “The company needs to be sustainable and the technology needs to be economically viable before you can save the planet,” says Shaw.
It was cost that derailed the idea of using methylococcus to produce feed when it was first introduced in the 1980s by Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil. At that time, the price of natural gas (used to run the fermenter) was too expensive to make the project sustainable and it was taken off the market. Calysta purchased the technology in 2014 and set to work refining it for production.
Forum for the Future, a UK-based non-profit, recently announced a coalition of business and NGOs with the goal of advancing alternative animal feeds. Simon Billing, its principle sustainability advisor, acknowledges that sustainable alternatives are hard to fund.
“One of the big barriers [to sustainability] is that climate change subsidies are focused on energy generation, not food and nutrition,” Billing explains.
This mean Calysta isn’t eligible for subsidies to help offset the costs of more expensive bio-methane or other renewable energy sources. If the subsidies and policies were aligned, as a feed production facility, Calysta could benefit from funding to use renewable energy. Right now, however, scaling requires going forward with more affordable fossil fuels.