Saving Seafood

Gulf shrimpers brace for offshore wind

August 25, 2022 — Trae Cooper risks punctures to the fiberglass hull of his grandfather’s boat every time he pulls out into the gray waters at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Trawling for shrimp that swim along Louisiana’s muddy coast means coexisting with the forgotten pipelines, corroded steel, gnawed plastic and bits of iron that the oil industry left behind as it marched gradually through these marshes and out to sea.

And that’s why Cooper, 39, and many shrimpers in the region say they know enough to worry as a new industry crops up in the Gulf of Mexico: offshore wind.

They wonder if transmission lines will add to the dangers that shrimpers and other commercial fishers already have to dodge, if turbines will take away places they could be shrimping, and if its planning will be done with shrimpers’ input taken seriously.

“If you got a whole field of wind turbines, you may knock out 2 miles of our fishing grounds. That’s a problem, not mentioning the transmission and everything that goes into it,” Cooper said.

Offshore wind appears imminent in the Gulf, one branch of President Joe Biden’s push to lift 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, helping to decarbonize the nation’s electricity grid in a fight against climate change. The administration is planning a first Gulf offshore wind auction by early next year, after finishing an environmental review of the industry’s impacts — including to marine life and fisheries.

Read the full story at E&E News

Offshore wind farms could reduce Atlantic City’s surfclam fishery revenue up to 25%, Rutgers study suggests

July 1, 2022 — New research from Rutgers University shows Mid-Atlantic surfclam fisheries could see revenue losses from planned offshore wind farms, at least in the short- to medium-term after the development takes place.

The data is sure to fuel opposition from the fishing industry to the Biden administration’s rapid offshore wind development along the New York, New Jersey, and Delaware coasts. President Joe Biden has a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of wind energy by 2030 as part of his effort to tackle climate change.

Clammers and scallop fishermen fear a shrinking patch of fishable ocean will lead to the collapse of the industry.

Surfclam harvests stretching from Maine to Virginia generate about $30 million in annual revenue. The Rutgers study, “The Atlantic Surfclam Fishery and Offshore Wind Energy Development,” published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, used a newly-developed model to determine average revenue reductions between 3 and 15% overall.

Read the full story at WHYY

As feds eye more wind leases off Virginia, fishing industries fear losses

June 23, 2022 — Today, two wind turbines turn off Virginia’s coast. But by the middle of the next decade, hundreds more may have joined them.

With a major push underway by President Joe Biden’s administration to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind as a way to reduce U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, federal officials are looking to dramatically expand the areas where wind farms can be built in U.S. waters.

Virginia is an epicenter of interest: Of 4 million acres of ocean identified as potential wind energy areas in a new Central Atlantic call area, most lie off the Virginia coast.

For the commonwealth’s fishing industries, already wary of what their business will look like once Dominion Energy’s 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is constructed, the prospect of a much more expansive buildout of wind power throughout the rich fishing grounds off Virginia is sparking fears that the new industry will drive out the old.

“We know that when these lease areas are built out, it is going to be displacing fishermen, who are then going to be working smaller and smaller areas with more and more boats, which is going to lead to localized depletion,” said Tom Dameron, government relations and fisheries science liaison for Surfside Foods, a New Jersey-based commercial clam fishing company that last year landed roughly 10 percent of the East Coast’s entire surf clam harvest in Cape Charles.

Read the full story at the Virginia Mercury

Don’t endanger aquatic ecosystems in the name of solving climate change

June 20, 2022 — In New England, too, we are being told that jeopardizing fishery-supporting ecosystems is the price we must pay to solve climate change. Here, the argument is coming from offshore wind proponents, who are working hand-in-glove with the Biden administration to set a course to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 — from a baseline of almost zero in just eight years — and 110 gigawatts by 2050, with most of the initial development taking place off New England and the mid-Atlantic and limited environmental review taking place prior to the issuance of leases.

What would this scale of development look like? With today’s technology, 110 gigawatts would be almost 8,500 turbines — 137 times the size of the Vineyard Wind facility planned for south of Cape Cod. It would mean near-continuous construction on the continental shelf for three decades. While no one knows what the ecological impacts of such construction might be (and that’s precisely our point), evidence suggests they may include alterations of the acoustic and sensory environment, electromagnetic fields, and current and wind patterns, affecting a variety of species whose survival depends on these aspects of the underwater world.

Offshore wind off New England and mining in the Bristol Bay watershed are linked by more than just spurious ultimatums invoking climate catastrophe as the inevitable consequence of keeping these wild places wild. It also happens that offshore wind, which requires hundreds of miles of electrical cables measuring up to 11 inches in diameter, is the most copper-intensive of all renewable energy technologies. Every mile of cable laid across the ocean floor will spur greater pressure to mine copper in precious, irreplaceable places like Bristol Bay.

Read the full op-ed at The Boston Globe

Biden proposes making underwater canyon off New York a marine sanctuary

June 9, 2022 — Long ago, the retreat of ice age glaciers carved one of the largest underwater canyons in the world into the seabed about 100 miles from New York City. Now, hundreds of species live there, including sperm whales, sea turtles and deep-sea corals.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that it intends to designate the area a new national marine sanctuary, which would give it some of the same protections afforded to national parks.

The Hudson Canyon — spanning nearly 7½ miles wide and more than two miles deep in some places — rivals the Grand Canyon in scale. The push to add it to the National Marine Sanctuary System reflects the Biden administration’s broader effort to safeguard critical habitat threatened by development and global warming by conserving 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters by 2030.

“A sanctuary near one of the most densely populated areas of the Northeast U.S. would connect diverse communities across the region to the ocean and the canyon in new and different ways,” Rick Spinrad, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said in a statement. “As someone who grew up in New York City and went on to a career in ocean science, I am excited about how this amazing underwater environment can inspire shared interest in conserving our ocean.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

CALIFORNIA: Process for offshore wind energy lease auction outlined

June 7, 2022 — A task force on renewable energy in California, as well as members of the public, last week heard how credits will be assigned to bidders in a lease auction of offshore tracts to develop wind-powered systems that could generate up to 3 gigawatts of electricity.

More than 300 people — most of them from companies related to the power generation industry — attended the online meeting of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s California Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force.

An update on the lease sales included a timeline to the online auction scheduled for this fall and an explanation of various plans bidders will have to submit and credits that can be granted for their plans to support the workforce and mitigate impacts.

Some task force members from Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties expressed concerns over project effects on a proposed national marine sanctuary and the low percentage of credits for mitigating impacts.

Amanda Lefton, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said seven lease sales are planned by 2025, including off the coasts of New York and the Carolinas, with a goal of producing 30 gigawatts of power by 2030.

Read the full story at the Santa Maria Times

2nd Interior lease sale boosts N.C. offshore wind

May 13, 2022 — Developers bet big on the prospect of offshore wind in North Carolina yesterday in an auction that accelerates the momentum of the Biden administration’s offshore wind thrust — and proves the industry aims to grow its footprint in the southern Atlantic.

After an all-day bidding war, French oil giant TotalEnergies SE and southern utility Duke Energy Corp. pledged a combined $315 million for the right to raise turbines in the sea off the state’s coast.

The two lease areas sold yesterday by the Interior Department could support an estimated 1.3 gigawatts of wind power between them and total 110,000 acres in federal waters roughly 20 miles south of North Carolina’s Bald Head Island. That’s enough to potentially power a half-million homes (Energywire, March 25).

The sale is part of the Biden administration’s push to raise hundreds of offshore wind turbines — 30 gigawatts of clean energy — on the outer continental shelf by 2030. Offshore wind is a critical lever in the White House’s larger climate ambitions, to decarbonize the nation’s grid by 2035 and zero out emissions economywide by midcentury.

But the robust sale that closed after 17 rounds of bidding was widely seen also as a success for the industry’s regional prospects and the sector’s growing potential footprint in the U.S. energy mix.

Read the full story at E&E News

‘Marine conservation talks must include human rights’: Q&A with biologist Vivienne Solís Rivera

March 29, 2022 — Human rights, such as those of small-scale fishers, must be included in the global conservation goal to protect 30% of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030, say environmentalists, otherwise this proposed conservation target will fail and the livelihood of Indigenous people and local communities (IPLCs) around the world will be jeopardized.

This is the urgent message in a new open letter directed at policymakers gathered in Geneva this month to finalize the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which will be presented at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB) conference, COP15, in China this April.

The open letter – created by the IPLC marine conservation organization Blue Ventures and signed by fishers, farmers, conservationists, environmentalists, human rights advocates and scientists around the world – refers explicitly to Target 3 of the framework, also known as 30×30. This target has been lauded internationally as an ambitious goal to protect 30% of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030, as the world faces a biodiversity crisis and mass species extinction.

But authors of the open letter point out that simply creating more reserve areas without IPLC inclusion is a flawed strategy. Too often, protected areas lead to displacements of IPLCs in the name of nature conservation.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Offshore Wind Turbines Could Mess With Ships’ Radar Signals

March 3, 2022 — Offshore wind development has the potential to transform the nation’s energy supply by providing clean power directly to big coastal cities. In fact, the Biden administration is pushing to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030—enough to power 10 million homes and reduce carbon emissions by 78 million metric tons.

But a new study might throw a wrench in those plans. It turns out that massive wind turbines may interfere with marine radar systems, making it risky for both big ships passing through shipping channels near offshore wind farms and smaller vessels navigating around them. While European and Asian nations have relied on offshore wind power for more than a decade, the big wind farms proposed off the US continental shelf are larger and spaced further apart, meaning that ships are more likely to be operating nearby. These farms are proposed along the East Coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina, as well as for a handful of locations off the California coast, according to data from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in a report issued last week that wind turbines can create two different problems. First, their steel towers can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships’ navigational radar systems in ways that might obscure a nearby boat.

Read the full story at Wired

Shifting ocean closures best way to protect animals from accidental catch

January 18, 2022 — Accidentally trapping sharks, seabirds, marine mammals, sea turtles and other animals in fishing gear is one of the biggest barriers to making fisheries more sustainable around the world. Marine protected areas — sections of the ocean set aside to conserve biodiversity — are used, in part, to reduce the unintentional catch of such animals, among other conservation goals.

Many nations are calling for protection of 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 from some or all types of exploitation, including fishing. Building off this proposal, a new analysis led by the University of Washington looks at how effective fishing closures are at reducing accidental catch. Researchers found that permanent marine protected areas are a relatively inefficient way to protect marine biodiversity that is accidentally caught in fisheries. Dynamic ocean management — changing the pattern of closures as accidental catch hotspots shift — is much more effective. The results were published Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We hope this study will add to the growing movement away from permanently closed areas to encourage more dynamic ocean management,” said senior author Ray Hilborn, a professor at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Also, by showing the relative ineffectiveness of static areas, we hope it will make conservation advocates aware that permanent closed areas are much less effective in reducing accidental catch than changes in fishing methods.”

Read the full story at UW News