K.C. Jordan, LJI Journalist

Representatives from Samonix, the company planning to build a land-based salmon farm in Litchield’s Pontiac Industrial Park, delivered project updates and addressed residents’ concerns at a public consultation hosted Thursday night at the Campbell’s Bay community centre.

A few dozen people were in attendance to hear from Samonix president Mathieu Farley, technical director Fred Brisco and senior director Rémi Bertrand on how the project might affect the surrounding environment, including the Ottawa River and the drinking water of residents living downstream of its proposed site.

Among those with concerns was Portage du Fort mayor Lynne Cameron. “Are we going to have to do additional water tests now?” she asked, noting the village’s water filtration plant is just downriver from the project’s proposed site.

“I hate to be negative on any type of new business or big project in the Pontiac, but not at the expense of our precious water,” she said in an interview.

Other attendees asked questions about the ethics of farming salmon in pools, the likelihood of possible pool breaches, and spin-off impacts of the farm on the local economy.

In a previous interview with THE EQUITY, Bertrand explained the company will raise the fish entirely indoors, in large pools of treated water that is drawn from the Ottawa River. A small water plant will sterilize and neutralize the water from the Ottawa River before it is used to fill the pools.

The facility will then use a method called the recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) which treats and recirculates 99 per cent of the water used to hold the fish. The remaining one per cent of wastewater that cannot be recirculated, largely fish feces, will be removed and treated through a process called biomethanization. 

The leftover liquid will be processed by a wastewater treatment plant, and then discharged into the Ottawa River as per the parameters set by the Ministry of Environment.

In response to the concerns raised, Brisco explained the project has met all provincial and federal environmental guidelines, and said the facility will release effluent back into the river gradually using a diluting machine at the end of a pipe that will end several metres from the edge of the river.

“Within the first 12 metres it is [ . . . ] diluted fivefold, and then if you go down to 70 metres and 120 metres it becomes undetectable,” he said.

“So if you guys are doing water treatment, it would have no impact on you whatsoever. Your intake is almost seven kilometres downriver from us, so there would definitely not be any impact there.”

“We will be monitoring our water quality in and out, every day, every hour,” added Farley, who said the health of the river water is also important to their business, which takes water from the river to be recirculated within the fish farm.

“We need it for the intake, and we need it for the outtake. Water quality is a major element of the business.”

In September, the Ottawa Riverkeeper’s director of science and policy Larissa Holman raised concerns about the salt levels in the fish farm’s wastewater, which would be released back into the Ottawa River.

The organization, dedicated to protecting the health of the Ottawa River, has spent several years studying the impact of road salt, and consequently chloride, on aquatic organisms.

“Chloride is toxic to aquatic environments [ . . . ] and can affect [organisms’] ability to breathe underwater and to reproduce,” she said, adding that the organization had met with Samonix to discuss these concerns.

Holman suggested Samonix would need to keep chloride levels under 120 mg/L of salt to respect guidelines developed by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment.

Brisco said the project has met all requirements from the province so far for chloride levels as well as other substances including phosphorus, ammonium-nitrogen, nitrates, and total suspended solids (TSS), emphasizing the roughly 2,300 cubic metres of water being released back into the river at times of peak production will be completely free of pathogens.

“The effluent is treated with ozone and UV rays,” he said. “Anything that is in our facility before going into the river is entirely sterilized at a high level, so there is no question that a pathogen that was in our facility would make its way into the river.”

Brisco said the company is still undergoing various environmental impact studies, and in order to get authorization from the provincial environment

“For the moment, it’s about environmental impacts, citizens’ concerns in terms of environmental impact, but after that there’s an extremely rigorous process from a technical point of view,” he said, adding that they will have to demonstrate the exact chemistry of the effluent.

More public consultations to come

The project is still waiting on a power hookup from Hydro-Québec as well as its authorization certificate from the province’s environment ministry.

The latter, Bertrand told THE EQUITY, will not arrive soon, as the province has now decided the project should be reviewed by Quebec’s public consultation bureau (BAPE), which wishes to hold additional consultations.

“By going through this new process, it adds probably about 12 months to our initial time schedule that we put forward,” he said. “We can do some work in parallel, but we do need to wait until we get any comments back before we can do final engineering.”

Bertrand added that in the meantime the company will continue to meet with stakeholders and build relationships with trucking companies and feed suppliers. He also said the company is exploring housing opportunities for eventual employees.

“If we go as expected and end up with 100 employees, there’s definitely going to be some housing requirements, because there’s already a shortage,” he said, adding that the company estimates to add another 500 construction jobs to the local economy.

Brisco provided information about the farm’s day-to-day operation, saying the facility will purchase fertilized salmon eggs from Iceland, hatch them, and grow the fish in five stages of increasingly larger tanks. Then, when the fish are fully grown, they will be gutted and prepared for shipping at an on-site transformation area.

Farley said once the company receives its environmental authorization it can begin working on the building plans, which will take about a year. “If things move the way we hope, we could start construction in the summer of 2027,” he said.

“It will take two years to build the facility,” he said, adding that the company would complete construction in the winter of 2029 and thus is likely about five years away from having its first fish.

“It’s a long project, it’s a big project, and if we have additional delays it will be a little later, but once we start we will be producing two million Atlantic salmon every year and sending them to the market.”

The project will have another public consultation as part of the BAPE process, but the exact date is unknown at this time.