Ocean Farming AS has awarded a contract to Rolls-Royce for the construction and delivery of an eight point mooring system to the world’s first offshore fish farm installation.
Ocean Farming AS is a subsidiary of the SalMar Group in Norway, one of the world’s largest and most efficient producers of farmed salmon.
The equipment will be used to secure the installation to the seabed at Frohavet, off the coast of central Norway. The 68m high rig will have a diameter of 110m and a volume of 250,000m3. The eight point mooring system to be delivered by Rolls-Royce includes monitoring, fairleads, connectors and subsea load sensing system.
Growth in the industry of harvesting from the sea is said to require use of new locations that offer good biological conditions for the farming of fish stocks. However, moving further offshore also requires new technology.
"This contract win shows how years of experience providing sophisticated mooring and deck machinery solutions in some of the world's most difficult sea conditions can be applied in other areas of the maritime economy today and for the future,” said Asbjørn Skaro, Rolls-Royce, executive vice president – deck machinery .
“The technical solutions for SalMar’s pilot installation is based on the state-of-the-art technology the Norwegian industry has to offer from both fields of aquaculture and offshore oil and gas."
Rolls-Royce has signed a contract with the Chinese Institute of Marine and Offshore Engineering, and the new semi-submersible rig will be constructed at Qingdao Wuchuan Heavy Industry Co. Ltd in China. It is designed by Global Maritime in Norway, and the pilot ocean fish farm is planned to be completed by the second half of 2017.
