Dredge emptying the lagoon at Millinocket, Maine, where the future Great Northern Salmon farm will be located.
Photo: Great Northern Salmon LinkedIn page.
As announced in mid-September, Great Northern Salmon (GNS) - formerly Katahdin Salmon and one of the companies included in the Xcelerate Aqua portfolio - began last week site preparations for its proposed facility in Millinocket, Maine. The future facility, which obtained critical permits in May, will house a land-based RAS farm to produce 5000 metric tons in Phase 1 with an expansion to 10,000 metric tons in Phase 2 of the construction.
For pre-construction development, since the inception of the project Great Northern Salmon has worked in partnership with the site owner, Our Katahdin, a non-profit organization to support community and economic development in the Katahdin region of Maine.
Now, in collaboration with the EPA - the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - and other entities, GNS and Our Katahdin have begun excavation of their lagoon structure to prepare the Great Northern Salmon site.
"Dredging of our 30-acre lagoon structure has started in partnership with EPA, Our Katahdin, and others," the company said on LinkedIn. "We will go as far as we can before winter, and start up again in the spring to decant and clear up the lagoon we are constructing inside," it had explained a few days earlier.
"When the work is completed, GNS has a fully excavated site with a glacial till foundation, providing significant cost and schedule benefits in the construction phase," added Great Northern Salmon.
A final test of the lagoon confirmed in late winter that there was no contamination of concern, so in the spring GNS issued a request for proposals for rehabilitation of the site. It then contracted Republic Services to execute the project, with Maine-based Sevee & Maher as its primary engineering partner. The anticipated schedule for pre-construction work is ten months.
GNS facility in Millinocket will be located on a 1400-acre property formerly owned by Great Northern Paper Company, which closed for good in 2008. When it opened in 1900, it was the largest paper mill in the world and the first to have a hydroelectric generation and distribution facility on site.
So not only does the location have plenty of clean, cold water but also a pre-excavated, pollution-free site that it can use with an outfall pipe and power infrastructure. The site also had 100% renewable energy and permits from the time when the plant was a pulp mill.
The successful completion of the project will provide Great Northern Salmon with a fully construction-ready site that will reduce construction time by more than six months and eliminate the risks associated with issues such as excavation, blasting, etc.
When ready, the site will be the future production location for GNS's first land-based RAS salmon farm. As CEO Marianne Naess explained WeAreAquaculture in an interview, the Millinocket site will be a modular design farm that can be copied for future sites.
Instead of building a 30,000 or 50,000-metric-ton facility on a single site, several 10,000-metric-ton facilities will be built, which - she told us - will facilitate site location and integration into communities.
