Demonstration of industrial scale production of hydrolysed peptides for human consumption from side-streams of salmon processing industries.

Introduction

The LIFE CONQUER project aims at sustainably exploiting the side stream of the salmon processing industry for producing salmon peptides and oil, to be used as ingredients for human nutrition at large scale. A sustainable first-of-its-kind biorefinery will be developed in Hirtshals (Denmark) based on know-how developed by BD, the Coordinator, in its DEMO plant, bringing the process from TRL 6 to TRL 8.

Investment and Infrastructure

The building of such a big system is huge in terms of effort and investments, i.e. the whole investment requires about 17 M€. Beneficiaries are already starting the work in autumn 2021, by using their own resources, to set up all the external infrastructure and some of the equipment needed for producing salmon peptides and oil as ingredients for human nutrition.

Project Objectives

At the beginning of the LIFE project, the biorefinery will be ready to host and demonstrate the innovative solutions for:

1. Extracting proteins from bones
2. In-situ spray drying
3. Innovative inbound logistics for raw material

These are the three main objectives of the LIFE CONQUER project. Once the three systems are set up, tested, and optimized, the whole biorefinery will be ready to demonstrate at an industrial scale the following environmental goals in line with the priorities of the LIFE programme:

• Reduction of bio-waste: about 21,000 tonnes/year of salmon offcuts will be saved when the biorefinery is fully operative, 18,300 during the project by reaching 87% of capacity.
• GHG reduction of about 1,623 tonnes of CO2eq/year.
• A water efficiency of 30,000 m³.
• Thermal energy saving of 23.6868 GWh/year.

Financial Sustainability

The P&L shows the sustainability of the BG business model, with a revenue of about 27 M€ and a total EBITDA foreseen to reach 15,394 K€ in 2028, confirming the profitability of the whole biorefinery.

Job Creation

The project will have benefits from the creation of new jobs, as 17 FTE will be employed in the biorefinery starting from 2023.