A new monster-sized deep-freeze warehouse
on land in Nibull, Germany will
be built by DuPont Nutrition to maintain
the company’s reputation for stability
and performance by leading yogurt,
fresh fermented and cheese industry
customers around the world. Running
with a temperature of minus 55 degrees
centigrade, the new storage centre is
part of an investment of around $60 million
for European cultures plants, and
will be built over the current logistics
building. Danisco Deutschland GmbH
plant manager Michael Paulseb says the
cold storage cell will be equipped with
a new, very energy-efficient insulating
panel. “Due to this, the new cooling
system will on average run significantly
less per day, which reduces energy use.
Furthermore, a heat recovery system
will be integrated into the refrigeration
technology. In the new storage there
will be ports with different temperature
zones as well as a semi-automated
transport system to load and unload a
freight elevator that ensures the material
transport from the ground to the
upper floor.” A two-storey building with
300 sq metres of floor space at each
level will be in front of the new deepfreeze
warehouse, and will include logistics,
building technology, office work
places, switch rooms as well as social
rooms for the employees working at
the logistic centre. DuPont expects the
construction work to be completed in
the fourth quarter of this year and that
the 12-metre-high building will be put
into operation by Christmas. “We count
on a combination of local planners and
regional specialist companies to realise
this important plant extension, building
upon the overall logistics of the plant,”
site manager Reinhold Sand says.
Norway’s government is pouring money into
its environmental contingency bunker – about
NZ$17.6 million worth – to safeguard the world’s
food supplies by installing a concrete access
tunnel and service building for emergency power,
refrigeration units and other electrical equipment.
The move has been forced by the 10-year-old vault
suffering flooding in 2016 when the surrounding
area experienced unseasonably high temperatures,
despite the facility being built to last more than
100 years. Located on the archipelago Svalbard,
the vault – tagged the ‘Arctic Doomsday Vault’ -
should have been safe from the effects of climate
change, as the seed samples are stored 400m
underground in a coal mine. Its concept was proven
successful in 2015, when seeds were withdrawn
to re-establish crops wiped out by civil war in Syria.
Seeds from the Margot Forde Germplasm Centre
in Palmerston North are included in the collection,
which is expected to survive thousands of years to
ensure against the loss of species in the event of a
large-scale regional or global crisis. MFGC director
Dr Kioumars Ghamkhar says New Zealand has
deposited (via airmailed package) several collections,
and will continue annually to build up a sufficiently
diverse collection of plant species of interest to
New Zealand agriculture. “We want to ensure that
should a major event happen in New Zealand like
earthquake, fire or a serious plant disease – that
wipes out the collection held at MFGC or a specific
plant species of interest to agriculture – we have
a back-up to draw on so they are not lost to us
forever.” Throughout the world there are 1700 gene
banks that house food crops for safekeeping. The
Norway facility can store millions of seeds in sealed
packages in sub-zero temperatures.
www.croptrust.org/our-work/svalbard-globalseed
vault/
MONSTER-SIZED
DEEP-FREEZE
WAREHOUSE
THE ARCTIC
DOOMSDAY VAULT
L O G I S T I C S
www.foodtechnology.co.nz 35
Location: A vault built 120m into a frozen
sandstone mountain in the middle of nowhere
between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
Task: filled with more than a million seed samples
from around the world (including New Zealand)
that it protects from climate change.
Problem: unseasonably warm temperatures which
have melted the permafrost around the vault.
DuPont officials start digging.
CRITICAL TEMPERATURE
/www.foodtechnology.co.nz
