Saving Seafood

North Carolina asks firms for seismic information

January 2, 2018 — RALEIGH, N.C. — The state Division of Coastal Management (DCM) has asked four companies to submit more information about proposed seismic testing for offshore oil and gas because the original proposals did not consider the latest scientific studies on the harmful effects to marine life.

According to a press release from the division, documentation to show that the companies’ plans are consistent with state coastal management rules were submitted and approved in 2015.

However, the administration of then-President Barack Obama did not approve the testing, and removed waters off North Carolina and the rest of the East Coast from the offshore drilling plan for 2017-22.

Many local governments along the coast, including Emerald Isle, Morehead City, Atlantic Beach and Beaufort, had urged the president not to OK testing and drilling.

Since then, however, President Donald Trump has restarted the process and directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to develop a new offshore drilling plan, expanding the years it would be valid.

According to the DCM release, additional seismic studies have since been conducted and suggest that shipboard seismic airgun arrays can significantly affect marine life.

Spectrum Geo Inc., GX Technology, MCNV Marine North America and TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Co. all want permission to tow arrays of the airguns behind ships, sending pulses to the ocean floor to locate oil and gas deposits.

DCM sent the companies letters requiring more information supporting their position that the plans meet state coastal policies.

Southport resident Randy Sturgill, who helped coordinate local and statewide anti-drilling-and-testing opposition efforts in North Carolina for Oceana, an international conservation group, said Friday it was good to see that the state “has its finger on the pulse,” not only on state residents’ feelings about offshore seismic testing and oil and gas drilling, but also on the latest science about the testing.

Read the full story at the Carteret County News-Times

 

New England fishermen worry that wind turbines could impact their catch

December 26, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — East Coast fishermen are turning a wary eye toward an emerging upstart: the offshore wind industry.

In New Bedford, fishermen dread the possibility of navigating a forest of turbines as they make their way to the fishing grounds that have made it the nation’s most lucrative fishing port for 17 years running.

The state envisions hundreds of wind turbines spinning off the city’s shores in about a decade, enough to power more than 1 million homes.

‘‘You ever see a radar picture of a wind farm? It’s just one big blob, basically,’’ said Eric Hansen, 56, a New Bedford scallop boat owner whose family has been in the business for generations. ‘‘Transit through it will be next to impossible, especially in heavy wind and fog.’’

Off New York’s Long Island, an organization representing East Coast scallopers has sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to try to halt a proposal for a nearly 200-turbine wind farm. Commercial fishermen in Maryland’s Ocean City and North Carolina’s Outer Banks have also sounded the alarm about losing access to fishing grounds.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Globe

 

Massachusetts: Three companies submit bids for offshore wind power

December 21, 2017 — Three offshore wind energy developers bid Wednesday on contracts to sell electricity to Massachusetts power companies, taking the next big step in a process that could set turbines spinning south of Martha’s Vineyard within the next five years.

“It’s in the hands of the utilities,” Vineyard Wind Chief Development Officer Erich Stephens said.

By April, Vineyard Wind, Bay State Wind and Revolution Wind will hear whether their bids have been selected for negotiation by the handful of electric distribution companies that will buy the wind energy. By the end of July, the utilities and offshore wind energy companies are expected to finalize long-term contracts and hand them over to the state Department of Public Utilities for review and approval.

Depending on the wind energy company, construction of anywhere from 50 to 100 turbines in federally leased, submerged areas could begin within two to five years. In addition to securing contracts to sell their energy, the companies face federal and state permitting requirements, including through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

“The critical path is the federal permit,” said Bay State Wind representative Michael Ausere, who is also vice president of business development for Eversource, which distributes electricity on Cape Cod and the Vineyard and is one of the utilities that would buy power from the wind farms. “This will be the first large-scale offshore wind farm.”

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

New York: Possible wind farm sites 17 miles off Hamptons identified

December 11, 2017 — A federal agency has identified a swath of the South Shore 17 miles off the coast of the Hamptons as a potential area for new offshore wind farms.

If selected, the site would encompass 211,839 acres of ocean waters 15 nautical miles from land, from Center Moriches to Montauk.

After a decade of slow progress in U.S. offshore wind, interest in the waters around Long Island and the Northeast has been heating up in recent years.

LIPA has approved a 90-megawatt project off the coast of Rhode Island, New York State has a plan to inject 2,400 megawatts of offshore wind into the state grid, and Norwegian energy giant Statoil has a lease for more than 70,000 acres 15 miles from Long Beach for an offshore wind farm that could be completed by 2024.

A Dec. 4 presentation by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says a “call for information and nominations” is about to begin for several large areas off the South Shore for wind farms.

The agency will accept information and site nominations before a 45-day public comment period about the sites. Once the agency formally identifies areas for wind farms, it could be months before a bidding process begins for all, some or possibly none of the sites.

Stephen Boutwell, a spokesman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said the East End site and three others listed on a map with the presentation were not yet “formal” call areas. The process of identifying those will begin early next year, Boutwell said. No cost estimates have been made.

The agency held an online conference earlier this month to “help inform what will be included in the draft call for information and nominations,” Boutwell said, an “early step in the process to solicit input from stakeholders” to “identify future potential wind-energy areas.”

Read the full story at Newsday

 

Massachusetts: The final blow for Cape Wind

December 4, 2017 — The proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm is no longer.

After more than 16 years, tens of millions of dollars spent and seemingly endless, at times deafening, debate, the announcement Friday that Cape Wind is officially dead came quietly by email.

“Cape Wind has confirmed to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that it has ceased development of its proposed offshore wind farm project in Nantucket Sound and has filed to terminate its offshore wind development lease that was issued in 2010,” according to a statement sent to the Times by Cape Wind vice president Dennis Duffy.

The project first proposed in 2001 and reviewed by dozens of local, state and federal agencies succumbed not under the weight of pressure from opponents or failure to clear any particular regulatory hurdle but rather from a combination of time and financial constraints that tightened and loosened over many years before constricting for good when utilities killed the contracts to buy power from the project’s 130 wind turbines in early January 2015.

Even after losing customers for its power, however, Cape Wind Associates LLC continued to shell out $88,278 to pay for a lease secured in 2010 covering 46 square miles of federal waters in the middle of the sound. That amount was a drop in the bucket compared to the more than $100 million the company had already spent on the project but whether it was what finally tipped the scales is unclear.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

It’s Over: Cape Wind Ends Controversial Project

December 4, 2017 — Cape Wind Associates announced today that it has ceased the development of its proposed offshore wind farm and is surrendering its federal lease for 46 square miles in Nantucket Sound, officially putting an end to a 16-year effort to build the controversial project.

“Cape Wind has confirmed to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that it has ceased development of its proposed offshore wind farm project in Nantucket Sound and has filed to terminate its offshore wind development lease that was issued in 2010,” according to a statement emailed to the Times by Cape Wind vice president Dennis Duffy.

The project was dealt a major setback in January 2015, when Eversource and National Grid ended those contracts to buy power from the turbines, and again in 2016 when the state Energy Facilities Siting Board declined to extend permits for the project that had originally been issued in 2009.

Opponents had argued the project was a danger to navigation, marine life, birds and the local economy. Proponents argued it was necessary to help combat climate change, would create jobs and would launch the country’s offshore wind energy industry.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

East Coast Fishing Coalition Continues Legal Challenge to Planned Wind Farm Off New York

WASHINGTON — December 1, 2017 — The following was released by the Fisheries Survival Fund:

A coalition of East Coast fishing businesses, organizations, and communities, led by the Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), has taken the next step in its legal challenge to a planned wind farm off the coast of New York. FSF and its co-plaintiffs argue that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) awarded the lease for the New York Wind Energy Area (NY WEA) to Norwegian energy company Statoil without fully considering the impact on fishermen and other stakeholders, in neglect of its responsibilities as stewards of ocean resources.

The plaintiffs outlined their arguments in a brief filed Tuesday in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. In the brief, FSF criticizes BOEM’s claim that it is not the agency’s job to resolve conflicts among new and pre-existing ocean users in the NY WEA. In an October filing, BOEM wrote that it is “not the ‘government steward of the ‘ocean commons,’’” a claim that FSF calls “unbecoming.” In fact, BOEM’s own website states: “The bureau is responsible for stewardship of U.S. [Outer Continental Shelf] energy and mineral resources, as well as protecting the environment that development of those resources may impact.”

FSF also writes that the NY WEA, an expanse of ocean nearly twice the size of Washington, D.C., is a poor location for a wind farm, and that BOEM and Statoil have alternately claimed that it is both too early and too late to raise objections to the lease. Statoil previously stated that vacating the lease would “squander the resources and the five years that BOEM has expended to date in the leasing process,” even as BOEM promises it will consider measures to mitigate the impacts of a wind farm later in the process. By then, after more time and resources have been expended, a wind farm “will be all but a foregone conclusion,” FSF writes.

Additionally, FSF argues that evaluating alternatives and considering conflicting ocean uses from the start would ultimately benefit BOEM and energy developers, ensuring they do not expend vast resources developing poorly located wind farms. The brief cites the ongoing debacle over the Cape Wind energy project, an approved wind farm off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as an example of what can go wrong when BOEM and a developer ram through an agreement and become too invested to turn back. After the project “slogged through state and federal courts and agencies for more than a decade,” delays and uncertainty have jeopardized, if not eliminated, Cape Wind’s financing and power purchase agreements, according to the brief.

The plaintiffs in this case are the Fisheries Survival Fund; the Borough of Barnegat Light, New Jersey; The Town Dock; Seafreeze Shoreside; Sea Fresh USA; Rhode Island Fishermen’s Alliance; Garden State Seafood Association; Long Island Commercial Fishing Association; the Town of Narragansett, Rhode Island; the Narragansett Chamber of Commerce; the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts; and the Fishermen’s Dock Co-Operative of Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

While the fishing groups hold wide-ranging views about offshore wind energy development, they all agree that the siting process for massive wind energy projects “should not be a land rush, but rather reasoned, fully informed, intelligent, and cognizant of the human environment,” according to the brief.

About the Fisheries Survival Fund
The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF) was established in 1998 to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Atlantic sea scallop fishery. FSF participants include the vast majority of full-time Atlantic scallop fishermen from Maine to Virginia. FSF works with academic institutions and independent scientific experts to foster cooperative research and to help sustain this fully rebuilt fishery. FSF also works with the federal government to ensure that the fishery is responsibly managed.

Appeal filed objecting to continued lease of Sound to Cape Wind

November 30, 2017 — The Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) are among those who have appealed a federal decision that reaffirmed Cape Wind’s long-term lease on 46 miles of Nantucket Sound, according to a press release.

The lease was reaffirmed in September despite the objections of dozens of stakeholders, including state and local leaders, the Aquinnah tribe, and the Steamship Authority, who all wrote letters to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management objecting to the ongoing lease. Cape Wind had proposed 130 wind turbines for Nantucket Sound, but the project has been stalled by legal challenges, and utilities have walked away from power purchase plans.

Read the full story at the Martha’s Vineyard Times

 

Fishing Groups and Communities Move Forward with Suit Against NY Wind Farm

WASHINGTON — September 19, 2017 — The following was released by the Fisheries Survival Fund:

A group of fishing organizations, businesses, and communities, led by the Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), has moved forward with its lawsuit to halt the leasing of a planned wind farm off the coast of New York. The suit, filed against the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), is seeking summary judgment and requesting the court to invalidate the lease, which was awarded to the Norwegian firm Statoil to develop the New York Wind Energy Area (NY WEA).

BOEM’s process for awarding the lease failed to properly consider the planned wind farm’s impact on area fish populations and habitats, shoreside communities, safety, and navigation. This violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires an assessment of these impacts before issuing the lease, in conjunction with a full Environmental Impact Statement and an evaluation of alternative locations for any proposal.

BOEM’s failure to consider the impacts to fisheries, safety, navigation and other natural resources in the NY WEA prior to moving forward with the leasing process also violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which charges BOEM with considering and providing for existing ocean users. And BOEM’s actions violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits agencies from acting in ways that are arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law.

The site for the proposed wind farm includes key scallop, squid, and other Atlantic fishing grounds, as well as ocean habitats that are crucial for species such as loggerhead sea turtles, right whales, black sea bass and summer flounder. Because of how BOEM’s leasing process unfolds, the wind farm’s expected impacts on natural resources and those who rely on them will not be examined until the project is nearing completion.

“The plaintiffs in this case believe sensible wind energy development and fishing can co-exist,” said David Frulla, who is representing FSF and the other plaintiffs in the case. “But any offshore energy project must first meaningfully consider the impact on the habitats, marine species, and economic interests that may be harmed before selecting a wind farm site and issuing a lease to a private developer.”

FSF and the other plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction against the $42.5 million lease before it was awarded in December 2016. While the judge presiding over the case stated that “the proper time for the agency to consider these environmental impacts may be at the present stage,” the request for a preliminary injunction was denied, as the judge did not believe it met the high standard of causing immediate harm that could not later be undone by a subsequent decision on the lease.

Following the plaintiffs’ filing last week, the federal government and Statoil are due to file their own cross-motions for summary judgment, and responses to the plaintiffs’ brief, in the coming months. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will then make a decision on the merits.

The Fisheries Survival Fund is the lead plaintiff in the case. The organizations and businesses that have joined the suit are the Garden State Seafood Association and the Fishermen’s Dock Co-Operative in New Jersey; the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association in New York; and the Narragansett Chamber of Commerce, Rhode Island Fishermen’s Alliance, SeaFreeze Shoreside, Sea Fresh USA, and The Town Dock in Rhode Island.

Municipalities that have joined the suit are the City of New Bedford, Mass.; the Borough of Barnegat Light, N.J.; and the Town of Narragansett, R.I.

North Carolina submits formal comments in opposition to offshore drilling

August 21, 2017 — Gov. Roy Cooper and the Department of Environmental Quality submitted formal comments yesterday to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to convey North Carolina’s opposition to oil and gas leasing for offshore drilling on North Carolina’s coast.

“Because offshore drilling threatens North Carolina’s critical coastal industries and unique coastal environment with limited benefits for our citizens, it is a bad deal for North Carolina,” Cooper wrote in the letter. “Accordingly, I ask that you respect the wishes of our state and maintain in the new OCS Leasing Plan the current prohibition of oil and gas drilling off North Carolina’s coast.”

Coastal tourism generates $3 billion annually in North Carolina and supports more than 30,000 jobs in the eastern part of the state. Commercial fishing also brings in hundreds of millions of dollars to the state every year.

Read the full story at Island Free Press