I’ll respond on your point 6 -
No shortage of crude fish oil. That won’t be a bottleneck. Globally, about 1,000,000 mt of crude fish oil gets produced in a given a year. If an El Niño year then it drops down to maybe 750-850,000 mt of crude fish oil.
Of that global total, say about 30+% comes from Peruvian anchovy oil with high/cheapest concentrations of EPA/DHA at 18/12. Chile also produces cheap commodity anchovy and sardine oil. In 2017 76% of fishoil went to aquaculture feed manufacturing. 17% to direct human consumption (DHC) and the other 7% to miscellaneous (like pet food). Maybe DHC trends up to 20-30% while aquaculture will trend down if Vascepa demand grows quickly.
The yearly average from 2013-2016 of crude fish oil production from Peru - 121,100 mt. Chile for the same period 111,200 mt. The USA - 89,100 mt.
Let’s assume a 7 to 1 refining ratio (varies a little depending on the process and crude oil used), but just to give a back of the napkin estimate- 7000 mt of crude to produce 1000 mt of EE EPA/DHA.
The API manufacturers will raise their bid prices to draw more crude oil away from the aquaculture feed supply chain. And they will - logistics are already in place. In the next 2-3 years small quantities of algae oil will come online, but won’t be priced competitively for a long time.
I do agree that a real problem will be the API manufacturers- 1) what are they going to do with all the excess DHA? So, will Amarin pay a price for their high EPA concentrate that will compensate for the excess DHA inventory? They likely will have to at least for awhile. Supplies of DHA for infant formula and eye supplements for AMD are in balance. 2) initially some Vascepa supply kinks are likely while the API manufacturers have to ramp up production to a new level if new RXes for patients scale quickly next year if Nov 10th results are good.
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