At the invitation of the Norwegian Embassy, a team from INESCTEC.OCEAN joined a Portuguese delegation led by the Secretary of State for Fisheries and the Sea, Salvador Malheiro, on a visit to Norway to discuss bilateral collaboration in ocean aquaculture. Returning to Trondheim and their work with partner SINTEF Ocean, the Institute’s researchers had the opportunity to explore in depth the offshore aquaculture landscape of a country that ranks among the world’s largest producers.
Nearly 3,000 kilometres separate Porto and Trondheim. Even so, the distance between Portugal and Norway has been narrowing, largely thanks to close cooperation between INESC TEC and SINTEF across several areas of ocean research and innovation.
Towards strengthening international collaboration between the two countries, the INESCTEC.OCEAN delegation, led by coordinators José Manuel Mendonça and Diana Viegas, joined the Secretary of State and the delegation travelling to Northern Europe – the visit included the SINTEF Ocean’s laboratory facilities.
The visiting group also included Marisa Lameiras da Silva, Director-General for Maritime Policy (DGPM), Pedro Pessoa e Costa, Portugal’s Ambassador to Oslo, and Hanne Brusletto, Norway’s Ambassador to Lisbon.
“This participation was highly important, not only for strengthening scientific and technological cooperation within the Centre of Excellence, but also for reinforcing bilateral collaboration between the two countries in ocean engineering,” explained José Manuel Mendonça, who also serves as President Emeritus of INESC TEC.
The agenda focused on a key sector of the Blue Economy: offshore aquaculture. According to the INESCTEC.OCEAN coordinator, “the visit made it possible to understand the true scale of ocean aquaculture in Norway, particularly in terms of leading companies, the sector’s economic weight, specific technologies, regulation and licensing, current operations, and future challenges”.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Norway recorded a total of 1.6 million tonnes of aquaculture products in 2022. Valued at around €10 billion, the Scandinavian country’s production exceeds that of all European Union Member States combined.
According to José Manuel Mendonça, this context “helps to frame the level of ambition sought for developing a sector that, in Portugal, still has a relatively modest scale”.
According to the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), also in 2022, national aquaculture production stood at just over 18,000 tonnes, valued at nearly €160 million. Even so, this represents almost double the figures recorded a decade earlier – a trend to which INESCTEC.OCEAN aims to contribute.
INESC TEC already holds a track record in research and technological development to support the sustainable growth of aquaculture. Projects such as Innoaqua and AquaBenefit (focused on algae and bivalve production, respectively) highlight the Institute’s active role in areas like sensing technologies, biomonitoring and AI applied to aquaculture.
However, “operating along the Portuguese Atlantic coast presents more complex challenges than in the fjords and the Norwegian Sea”. Therefore, despite Nordic leadership in the sector, “there remains opportunities for new scientific and technological developments through joint projects between INESC TEC and SINTEF teams,” concluded José Manuel Mendonça.
The two-day programme in Trondheim included not only visits to SINTEF Ocean’s facilities but also trips to the Norwegian Plankton Technology Centre and the SeeSalmon Knowledge Centre, operated by SalMar – a company dedicated to offshore salmon aquaculture.
In collaboration with Norwegian institutions and industry stakeholders, the delegation also had the opportunity to observe demonstrations of advanced offshore aquaculture operations, presented by Vegar Johansen, CEO of SINTEF Ocean. “It was an opportunity to contribute to public policy in the maritime sector and to lay the groundwork for specific scientific and technological development projects in this field,” added José Manuel Mendonça.
Ongoing cooperation between INESC TEC and SINTEF also led to a parallel agenda item alongside the Secretary of State’s visit: the inaugural meeting of a joint project between INESCTEC.OCEAN and SINTEF Ocean to develop monitoring and structural maintenance systems for floating offshore wind turbines.
The coordinator of INESC TEC-led Centre of Excellence emphasised that this initiative “not only reflected the interest of both institutions and both countries in offshore wind energy” but also demonstrated the “strong cross-cutting expertise required for such complex systems, especially those designed and tested to operate in extreme marine conditions”.
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