Instead of expiring in late October, Options to Lease will now expire in late March 2020.
In early April, Cermaq announced that it had been awarded three Options to Lease – two in the Chedabucto Bay region, and one south of Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada. It needs 10-20 sites to make the USD 500 million project viable.
It has now applied for a six-month extension of its Options to Lease, which would mean that instead of expiring in late October, they would now expire in late March 2020.
In its latest Hello Nova Scotia! newsletter, the Mitsibushi-owned salmon farmer has now said that it needed more time to investigate the possibility of expanding Atlantic salmon farming operations into Nova Scotia – specifically the Digby, Guysborough and Richmond areas.
“We know that we have to find enough suitable sites to accommodate up to 20,000 metric tonnes of production. The reason for this is that we don’t own any facilities in Nova Scotia – and in order to set up the business, we would need to build or purchase all of the required infrastructures. The minimum size of operations required to support the business costs to start up is about 20,000 metric tonnes,” it wrote.
Feasibility and site investigation work is going to be used as the basis for whether it moves to the next step, which would be applying for a lease and license, Cermaq added.
