The company Pure Salmon, financed by a Singaporean fund, wants to install a giant salmon farming site on the French Atlantic seaside in Verdon-sur-Mer, close to Bordeaux, to produce 5% of the salmon consumed in France. The environmental authority is concerned about the impacts of the project on a drinking water reserve.
The plant will be located on a 14-hectare industrial site in the Port of Bordeaux, within the Médoc Regional Nature Park. To supply the basins of its mega-plant, the company plans to pump 6,500 m3 per day from a brackish aquifer. A particularly important issue in the dossier concerns the preservation of the Eocene aquifer [which lies below the Plio-Quaternary aquifer and is a source of drinking water], both in terms of quantity and quality [in particular by preventing the worsening of saline intrusion into this aquifer],” the environmental authority Mission régionale d’autorité environnementale MRAe says in its report.
The 10,000 tonne per year industrial salmon farming project shall start marketing the fish in 2029. The MRAe however is concerned about the water abstractions that could affect a drinking water table. Pure Salmon says its studies show there is no interaction between the brackish water it will pump and deeper groundwater tables. Hydrological experts are due to give their opinion on this risk by the end of the year.
