SINGAPORE: As a young man, he answered the call of the sea and went on to a globe-trotting marine engineering career in the oil and gas industry.
At the age of 60, Leow Ban Tat could have been comfortably retired.
Instead, he took the plunge in 2018 to pursue a new dream – that of feeding the masses healthy fish reared in a system insulated from the vagaries of the open sea.
“Our local farmers work very hard.I think they are very experienced,” he said.But events like algal blooms, which can kill massive numbers of fish, leave offshore open-net fish farmers helpless.
Technology, he believes, can overcome these challenges and help the sector produce quality fish.
Leow, 64 , began sketching his ideas from around 2014.Oil prices had plunged due to a supply glut.An oil and gas consultant at the time, he thought: “Instead of grumbling about the downturn of the industry, why don’t I just use what I know… to create something new?”
Floating structures were what he knew well.Leow came up with drawings of tanks on a buoyant structure for fish farming.He called his design Eco-Ark and patented it in 2018..
