Name change signals a quiet RevolOcean for prawn farmer
New monicker 'better reflects where Scottish company is heading' as it seeks capital for scale-up
Scottish land-based king prawn farmer Rastech Ltd has changed its name to RevolOcean Ltd, which chief executive Sarah Whiston says will “better reflect where we are and where we are heading”.
RevelOcean operates a clean water recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) in Guardbridge, near St Andrews, and has a strong focus on circularity. It currently produces around a tonne of warm water king prawns (Litopenaeus vannamei) a year in a 30-metre-long hoop-framed pilot unit and plans to raise ÂŁ1.85 million for a 90-metre unit on site that will increase annual production to 50 tonnes.
Scaling up
After that, RevelOcean plans a roll-out of 600-tonne-per-year farms which will each comprise 12 production buildings and will utilise waste heat from neighbouring industrial sources such as data centres or green hydrogen production. It has earmarked locations for its first three full-sized production sites in Scotland, England, and Denmark.
RevelOcean’s electricity is generated by solar panels, and heat comes from a biomass boiler. It says its building design, which incorporates two-feet thick insulation, means that maintaining the warm water prawn RAS at 32°C requires just 8-9% of the energy that would be needed for a land-based prawn facility in a conventional building.
In a LinkedIn post yesterday, RevolOcean explained the logic behind its name change.
“When we started the company in 2020, the name Rastech made perfect sense. We were setting out to build better recirculating aquaculture technology. For salmon, at the time,” wrote the company, which is run by Whiston and her husband, Andrew.
“We soon realised that if we wanted to build great technology, we had to become operators ourselves. The only way to really prove an idea is to use it, profitably.
“So we built our first commercial shrimp farm. Then a hatchery.
“Those decisions taught us far more than we expected.
Rapid production
“Today, we're focused on building commercially successful land-based RAS shrimp farms close to market. If anything, we're more convinced than ever that this is one of the biggest opportunities in aquaculture. The combination of rapid production cycles, established consumer demand and a global market measured in millions of tonnes every year is hard to match.
“Over the last few years, we realised we’d become something bigger than the name Rastech could describe.
“We found ourselves thinking less about individual technologies and more about whole ecosystems, where the waste from one process becomes the feedstock for another.
“So Rastech becomes RevolOcean.”
The company adds: “The name will make sense soon enough. As the marketing guys would say, a RevolOcean is coming (although it's going to be a boring, slow, well-thought-out one).”
Read more about RevolOcean in the current online edition of Fish Farming Expert magazine.