Qatar to turn gas into fish food

DUBAI: A Qatari company hopes to use the country’s abundant gas reserves to make protein for fish food and other animal feeds.
Gulf Biotech, the Doha-based industrial biotech investor, and Unibio have signed a license agreement to produce sustainable and organic protein in Qatar.
“The abundance of natural gas in Qatar makes the country an obvious choice for the production of Uniprotein,” said Henrik Busch-Larsen, CEO of Unibio. “Together, we can help address one of Qatar and the world’s major challenges and sustainably feed the world’s growing population.”
Gulf Biotech has signed a license agreement for a plant which will initially have one module – consisting of four protein fermenting machines with a total annual capacity of 6,000 tons of Uniprotein.
The technology is based on a modular design and extra modules can be added to expand the production, it said.
The Uniprotein produced in the plant will be used as a protein supplement in feed for fish and animals to replace existing products derived from fish meal or soy.
The planned facility will be the region’s first natural gas to protein plant and will be based on Unibio’s U-Loop technology, where natural gas is converted through continuous fermentation into Uniprotein.
Gulf Biotech said that Uniprotein is highly resource-efficient and sustainable compared with the production of traditional protein, such as fish meal and soy. Relative to soy production, Uniprotein uses 1/300th of the water and 1/25,000th of the land, it said.

Qatar to turn gas into fish food