The overall idea of the WeBoat project is to develop and demonstrate an environmentally friendly marine water purification technology for chemical post-sealice treatment application. The salmon parasite sealice is still a major problem in aquaculture along Norwegian and European coastlines. To combat sealice, the fish can be treated by delousing pharmaceuticals-based bath treatment on board of wellboats or in pens at sea by service boats. After treatment, the treated wastewater is usually released back to sea, along with the remaining medicines and other chemicals generated in the water during chemical sealice treatment. Some of those released chemicals might be potentially harmful to the local aquatic environment, and will increase the problem of medicine resistant sealice emergence. Therefore, recent and upcoming national regulations are becoming stricter for the reduction of the discharge of delousing agents.
WeBoat solution will answer to those regulations by providing removal and/or neutralization of medicines or other chemical residuals in delousing wastewater. First, the potentially most harmful release of sealice agents will be identified and defined by the project as the target for the removal treatment. The WeBoat technology development will be based on maritime technology transfer from ballast water treatment technology. The removal efficiency of combination of physical separation (filtration) and/or UV irradiation, together with other methods, will be demonstrated in small scale experiments and verified finally in full scale experiments with representative fish water quality.
The ultimate goal of the R&D work will be to determine optimal conditions for dimensioning, operation and management of the maritime technology onboard of a vessel for efficient removal of the pollutants in the delousing wastewater according to environmental regulations, while minimizing energy consumption, footprint and cost for competitiveness on the market.
Coordinator
Dr Pernilla Carlsson, Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Norway
Consortium
Norwegian Institute for Water Research, Norway
Hydac Process Technology GmbH, Germany
Norwegian Coastal Shipowners, Norway
Norwegian Greentech AS, Norway
PHARMAQ AS, Norway
Aqua Pharma, Belgium
Fraunhofer IKTS, Germany