CO2 removal from process water is an essential component of land-based aquaculture. However, current aeration-based degassing technology implemented in Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) is rather large-scale and thus associated with significant investment costs, limiting overall plant size and growth in the land-based aquaculture sector.
CARBIOMEMBEX aims at developing novel technology for CO2 separation in aquaculture by combining state-of-the-art membrane technology and biocatalysis into innovative enzyme-membrane contactor systems for efficient CO2 removal from water. This ground-breaking idea, once experimentally proven, has the potential to become a game-changer in the Norwegian land-based aquaculture industry and promote sustainable growth. Our vision is that this new technology will greatly improve the scalability and reduce investment costs of RAS installations, as well as other closed systems at sea or in live fish transport.
The development and demonstration of the new technology follows a two stage process. In a 1-year pre-project we will make key developmental steps and provide a functional proof-of-concept of our envisioned novel, enzyme-assisted membrane technology to efficiently remove CO2 from aquaculture water (TRL1-3). In a subsequent 3-year Researcher Project, we will optimize the system on all relevant levels and build a demonstrator unit for presentation to the aquaculture industry (TRL3-5/6). Techno-economic evaluations will guide our efforts from the very beginning.
The pre-project consortium consists of four research groups at SINTEF Industry and SINTEF OCEAN AS, combining all relevant expertise and infrastructure for successful proof-of-concept. In the subsequent Researcher Project, the consortium will be expanded with relevant additional national and international partners. At this point, also relevant industry will be associated to the project to ensure exploitation of the project results.
The CARBIOMEMBEX project is a research project financed by the Research Council of Norway through the HAVBRUK2 program.
