Bulgaria sits where Europe meets the Black Sea, and that is the short answer to why we chose it. The coast gives us brackish sea water, the hinterland gives us fresh water, and the port at Varna puts our customers within reach. Few places in Europe offer all three at once.
What we want to build here is a fish farm that pays for itself and still leaves the region better off than it found it. That means supplying Bulgarian and European buyers with fish raised a few kilometres from where it is sold, rather than flown in from another continent. It means bringing in aquaculture technology that local producers can learn from and use themselves.
It also means putting something back. Sterlet and Black Sea sturgeon are under real pressure in the wild, and a land-based farm can take part in restocking work instead of competing with it. Around Varna the project should create skilled jobs and modern infrastructure, and it is designed to fit the Bulgarian and EU programmes for sustainable fisheries and food security rather than work around them.
Three things make the difference between a modern land-based farm and a conventional one. None of them is magic, and all of them are engineering.
The first is that every tank runs on its own water loop. If something goes wrong in one tank, it stays in that tank. That matters more than it sounds: in a shared system a single pathogen can move through the whole stock in days. Separate loops also let us hold different species at different temperatures and water chemistry in the same building, which is what makes a mixed programme of sturgeon, trout and warm-water species possible at all.
The second is energy. Varna has a mild coastal climate, which means we spend far less on heating and cooling than a farm further north or inland would. Heat pumps and combined heat and power units are planned to cover the rest. Water quality is measured continuously and the recirculation system returns most of the water to the tanks, so the farm draws only a fraction of what a flow-through operation would need.
The third is that we would rather the project became useful to more than ourselves. Bulgaria has a small aquaculture sector and very little land-based capacity. If the design works here, the parts of it that are worth copying should be available to other producers, not locked away.
ECOMAR is set to become a pioneer in Bulgarian aquaculture, cultivating an extensive array of fish species categorised by market value and ecological importance. We take pride in a sophisticated selection that caters to both domestic and export demand.
Huso huso
Huso dauricus
Acipenser baerii
Acipenser persicus
Oncorhynchus masou
Oncorhynchus mykiss
Salmo trutta
Salmo salar sebago
Salvelinus alpinus
Salvelinus umbla
Hucho taimen
Thymallus thymallus
Stenodus nelma
Coregonus lavaretus
Coregonus muksun
Coregonus migratorius
Lates calcarifer
Sander lucioperca
Epinephelus coioides
Paralichthys olivaceus
Clarias gariepinus
Anguilla anguilla
Mugil cephalus
Mullus surmuletus
Homarus spp.
Scylla spp.
Penaeus monodon
Panulirus spp.
A fish farm that only sells whole fresh fish leaves most of its margin on the table. The plant at Varna is planned to cover the full range of processing, so that every part of the harvest finds a buyer.
On the traditional side that means salting, pickling, drying, hot and cold smoking, canning and preserves. Trimmings and off-cuts go into minced products such as fish sausages and cutlets, and what is left after that becomes fish oil and fish meal rather than waste.
The canned range is planned in two directions. Fish in oil, with smoked trout and smoked sturgeon as the lead products, aimed at retail and at the delicatessen trade. And fish canned in its own juices, with trout, carp and zander, for buyers who want the plain taste and nothing added.
Alongside that come fillets, hams and rolls for kitchens and caterers, and a deep-frozen line of steaks, skin-on fillets and whole gutted fish for customers who need a long shelf life.
The plan is to build in the Asparuhovo district of Varna, on the strip between the open Black Sea and the sheltered water of Lake Varna. The country's largest port is on the same water. So is the Institute of Oceanology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, which is the reason we can expect to find people locally who already know this kind of work.
The buildings are planned as insulated modules rather than open ponds. That is what lets us hold stable temperatures through a Bulgarian summer and winter alike, keep the stock separated from wild fish and disease, and produce at the same rate all year instead of following the seasons.
The recirculation system is laid out as several halls, each holding a number of large tanks sized for high stocking density. Water leaving the tanks is treated and returned rather than discharged, which is the part that protects Lake Varna and the coastal water next to it. Nutrients that the fish do not use are intended to go into hydroponic growing beds instead of into the sea.
The water supply is designed as a closed circuit, built from components that are already in service at established European farms rather than from prototypes.
Fry are planned to arrive in four separate batches a year. Spreading the intake like this keeps every stage of the farm working at a steady rate, instead of the whole plant running flat out for a few months and standing half empty for the rest.
The recirculation plant itself is modular and compact, which is what makes it possible to produce a lot of fish on a small footprint and to keep producing regardless of the weather outside. Varna's climate makes that easier than it would be almost anywhere else on the Black Sea.
Inside, the facility is divided into zones that do not mix: broodstock, growing, and processing, each with its own access rules and hygiene regime.
The farm draws on brackish water from the Black Sea and on fresh water from local sources, and almost all of it is recycled inside the closed loop. The working design uses the treatment stages that are standard in the industry: mechanical filtration, biological removal of ammonia and nitrite, degassing, and disinfection without chlorine or comparable chemicals.
Alongside that, we are testing a resonance-based purification method that is intended to cut the energy needed for the treatment stage. It is a promising line of work, and it is not yet proven at production scale. We will describe it here in detail once we have measured results from our own plant. Until then, the conventional treatment train remains the basis of the design, and nothing in the production plan depends on the new method working.
A recirculating system costs more to build than a net pen and more to run than a pond. It earns that back in four ways.
Fish grow faster, because temperature, oxygen and water chemistry stay where they should be instead of following the weather. The same control allows high stocking densities; the design figure for sturgeon in the grow-out stage is up to 70 kg per cubic metre, and the final figure will follow from our own trials. Output is predictable, which matters when a retail chain wants the same quantity every week of the year. And the farm uses a fraction of the water and land that an open system needs for the same tonnage.
There is a fifth reason that is harder to price. A closed system does not release nutrients, medication or escaped fish into the surrounding water, which is what makes it possible to build on a coast like this one at all.
Fish waste is a problem in one system and a fertiliser in another. Water leaving the tanks carries nitrogen and phosphorus that plants need, so it goes into hydroponic beds instead of into a treatment plant. The plants take up the nutrients, the water comes back cleaner, and the same volume does two jobs.
What grows in those beds is planned as salad, herbs and berries: crops with a short cycle and a local market. It is a second income from water we have already paid to clean, and it is the part of the design that makes the word circular mean something concrete.
A land-based farm runs on electricity, and it runs on it around the clock. Pumps, oxygen, heating and cooling do not stop, which is why the energy concept matters as much as the biology.
One of the options under review is hydrogen. Toshiba Energy Systems and Solutions builds a self-contained system called H2One that uses renewable electricity to split water, stores the hydrogen, and converts it back to electricity and hot water with no carbon dioxide at the point of use. It fits in a twenty-foot container and has been running in Japan since 2015, mainly to help grid operators absorb fluctuations in demand. Singapore's grid operator has been testing it under local conditions.
ECOMAR is in discussion with Toshiba about whether a configuration of this kind suits the Varna location. How much of our demand it could cover, and whether a grid connection stays as the fallback, are questions for the engineering study rather than for this page.
Part of the process technology in the plan comes from work by Prof. Khachatryan on hydrogen-based water and feed treatment. We hold access to these methods and intend to use them, and we think it is only fair to say plainly which results come from laboratory and pilot work and still have to be confirmed at our own scale.
The first method treats and activates the water used in the hatchery. In trials it produced noticeably faster growth in fry and better survival than the sixty to seventy percent that is normal in conventional hatchery practice. The reported factor is between one and a half and two times the usual growth rate. We will publish our own figures once we have a full production cycle behind us.
The second is a feed additive that releases hydride ions in water. The reported effects are better weight gain on feed with less protein and fat, higher egg production and a more robust immune system. Again, these are trial results, not yet ours.
The third concerns processing rather than farming. Fish meat is treated in an electrochemically activated mineral solution, which disinfects it and extends shelf life without chemical preservatives. Caviar is treated in the same solution and seasoned with a hydrogen-based salt, which is reported to improve keeping quality and flavour. Whether we adopt this for the whole product range will depend on our own testing and on Bulgarian and EU food law.
Cans are a bigger cost item in fish processing than most people expect, and buying them in means paying someone else's margin on every unit sold. The plan is to produce them at the farm on Alfons Haar equipment.
The format is a two-piece drawn and redrawn can in 0.14 mm DR8 material, which is among the thinnest on the market. Thinner walls mean less steel per can, in the order of a fifth less than a conventional format, and the equipment supplier puts the annual saving per line in the seven-figure range. That figure comes from the supplier and applies to a line running at full capacity, so treat it as an upper bound until our own line has run for a year.
Sidewall and base geometry are designed to keep the can rigid despite the thinner material.
The processing plant is planned around equipment that is standard in the European industry, for the simple reason that spare parts and trained staff are easier to find that way.
Cutting and filleting run on Marel lines, which give a higher yield from each fish than hand work and keep the portions within the tolerances that retail buyers specify. Smoking and curing run on modern lines where the result is the same from the first batch of the day to the last. Packing and cold storage are part of the same building, so the fish never leaves the cold chain between the tank and the lorry.
An area of this size on an open coast is difficult to watch from the ground. Fences and cameras cover the perimeter, but they do not cover the roofs, the water intake or the parts of the plot that are still under construction.
That is the job we intend to give to drones. A patrol drone flies a fixed route on a schedule, day and night, and it does not get tired or distracted. It is not a replacement for the people on the ground. It is what lets a small team keep watch over a large area.
The system we are looking at works as a pair. The drone itself is light, flies its route without a pilot, records video, and lands and charges on its own. The base station houses it, charges it, and processes what its sensors bring back, so that a person only has to look at the exceptions rather than at hours of footage.
The first two years go into building. The main facility in the Varna region has to be finished and the first production cycles started, and in parallel we need a distribution network in Bulgaria itself, with the large retail chains in Varna, Sofia, Burgas and the other regional centres.
From 2028 the plan is to take the farm to full capacity and to move up the value chain. That means branded products rather than raw fish: smoked, canned and ready to eat for the Bulgarian market, and the high-value lines, sturgeon and caviar above all, for the European single market and the Black Sea region.
The last two years are about reaching customers directly and about the next species. Branded outlets and food trucks in the larger Bulgarian cities put our name in front of people who will never see the farm. At the same time we want to work on farming further local species that no one is producing commercially yet, which is where the food-security argument stops being a slogan and starts being a supply.
ECOMAR is building a land-based fish farm on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, and we are open about the fact that it is still a project rather than a running plant. If that interests you, talk to us early rather than late.
Buyers get a straight answer on what we can deliver and when. Investors get the current documentation together with the assumptions behind it, so the figures can be judged rather than believed. And anyone who simply wants to understand how a closed system works is welcome to ask.