Demands for aquaculture products are ever rising at global level and are resulting in greater investments in the development of efficient and sustainable mariculture farms. However, these developments imply increase in energy needs, which are nowadays mainly ensured from fossil fuels. This work provides an overview of environmentally friendly energy alternatives that are being developed under the Research Center for Intelligent, Inovative, Enviromentally Friendly and Sustainable Mariculture (INTEL-MARIC) that has been founded at UNIZAG FSB. Basic goals, research strategy and activities of INTEL-MARIC are illustrated. Moreover, this work represents extension of investigations presented Korican et al. (2020, 2022) which resulted in alternative configurations of aquaculture systems that enable integration of high share of renewable energy sources. Previous works were limited to the evaluation of carbon footprint, while this one also includes evaluation of other polutants originating mainly from the internal combustion engines onboard aquaculture support vessels as for instance NOx, SOx, PM, etc. Alternative powering options for the complete aquaculture system were evaluated in order to identify those with minimum environmental footprint, simultaneously taking into account costs and environmental regulations. Above developments are illustrated for an aquaculture farm in Croatia, but they are generally applicable if the relevant set of input data is known. Further investigations will include feasibility of the same aquaculture system at different locations along the Adriatic coastline, that have different wind and insolation profiles, and consequently different protential of integaration of high share of RES.
Selected references
Korican, M., Percic, M., Vladimir, N., Soldo, V.: Integration of renewable energy sources into the aquaculture systems considering environmental and economic aspects, 12th Int. Conf. on Appl. Energy (ICAE2020), Bangkok, Thailand, 2020.
Korican, M., Percic, M., Vladimir, N., Soldo, V., Jovanovic, I.: Environmental and economic assessment of mariculture systems using a high share of renewable energy sources, J. of Cleaner Production, Vol. 333, 2022., No. 130072, 13 p.
Acknowledgement
This investigation has been funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund of the European Union within the project “Research Center for Intelligent, Inovative, Enviromentally Friendly and Sustainable Mariculture (INTEL-MARIC)”, granted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Directorate of Fisheries, Republic of Croatia.