Saving Seafood

Interior to Hold Massive Sale of Offshore Oil and Gas Leases

February 21, 2018 — The Interior Department announced Friday that the sale of leases on 77.3 million acres off the Southeast coast for oil and gas exploration will occur on March 21.

The sale, which Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said is the largest in U.S. history, will consist of leases off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. It includes all currently unleased areas in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Responsibly developing our offshore energy resources is a major pillar of President Trump’s American Energy Dominance strategy,” Bernhardt said. “A strong offshore energy program supports tens of thousands good paying jobs and provides the affordable and reliable energy we need to heat homes, fuel our cars, and power our economy.”

Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a New Orleans-based nonprofit that is heavily involved in environmental issues asked “How stupid can we be?” when she learned of the scheduled lease sale.

“The Gulf Coast is consistently nailed by hurricanes and yet our government insists on an energy strategy that exacerbates these hurricanes,” she said.

“A real energy strategy would be one that pursues renewables full speed ahead. Their so-called energy strategy is really a scheme for corrupt politicians to enrich themselves and their cronies,” Rolfes added.

Raleigh Hoke, campaign director of the Gulf Restoration Network, also took a dim view of the Interior Department announcement.

“We are disappointed that this Administration is moving forward with yet another lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico while simultaneously rolling back key safety measures to protect workers and the environment,” Hoke said. “Oil spills and accidents are an everyday occurrence in the Gulf, and we’re still at risk of a major catastrophe like the 2010 BP drilling disaster. We need stronger safety requirements, not weaker, and an end to all new offshore leasing in the Gulf.”

“Trump’s auctioning off this massive amount of our ocean while at the same time proposing to rollback important environmental and safety requirements,” agreed Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

 

New Yorkers rally against offshore drilling plan

February 16, 2018 — ALBANY, N.Y. — Wearing fish-shaped caps and armed with a megaphone, New York state’s leading environmental advocates protested President Donald Trump’s plan to open offshore areas to oil and gas drilling on Thursday as federal energy officials held an open house on the proposal near the state Capitol.

The group, wearing caps shaped like sturgeon, salmon and other vulnerable ocean species, included Aaron Mair, past president of the Sierra Club, and Judith Enck, the regional Environmental Protection Agency administrator under former President Barack Obama. They said Trump’s plan could devastate the environment while leaving potential renewable energy sources untouched. They called on Congress to pass a law blocking the proposal.

“We all remember the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe,” Enck said into a megaphone, referring to the 2010 rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that triggered the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. “We cannot afford that reckless activity in the Atlantic.”

Inside, federal energy officials handed out information packets and briefed members of the public on the president’s decision last month to open most of the nation’s coast to oil and gas drilling as a way of making the U.S. less dependent on foreign energy sources. Several dozen people had trickled through at the midpoint of the four-hour open house. Members of the public were encouraged to submit written comments.

William Brown, chief environmental officer at the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said he welcomed comments from opponents to the plan.

Read the full story from Associated Press at the Seattle Times

 

GMFMC approves EFP applications

February 15, 2018 — Any review of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council’s recent meeting in New Orleans begins with the discussion of state recreational red snapper management, and its review of the five Gulf states’ application for exempted fishing permits for 2018 and 2019.

The GMFMC’s first step was to come up with a way to, as the council’s report stated, “to estimate red snapper biomass off each state, which will be used in one of the alternatives for allocating the red snapper quota among the states.”

Briefly, Louisiana has estimated its allocation in the neighborhood of 15 percent of the annual total allowable catch for the recreational sector, a figure state managers have set at slightly more than 1 million pounds.

The council voted to exclude the 2010 landings, the year of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, a move which could help Louisiana, since most of the spill affected our offshore waters (and nearshore, too.)

There was debate about how to handle headboats and charterboats under this EFP. From reports, Louisiana’s delegation supports retaining these operations in the recreational sector. It appears two other states want to remove these operations from the recreational umbrella.

In the end, the GMFMC gave its approval for each state’s EFP, “with the condition that if federal for-hire vessels are included in any state’s EFP, it would not shorten the length of the federal for-hire season.”

The council also recommended National Marine Fisheries Service advance the Florida Keys Commercial Fishing Association’s Lionfish EFP request, which modified the sampling area for this invasive species.

Read the full story at the Acadiana Advocate

 

In New Jersey, opponents of offshore drilling gear up for a fight

February 15, 2018 — Jim Lovgren is a third-generation fisherman and captains the Shadowfax. At the Fisherman’s Coop in Point Pleasant New Jersey recently, he watched as about a half-dozen men sorted freshly caught scup — or porgies — into bins.

“These fish they’ll be put in a cooler by tonight,” he said. “There could be 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of fish on the docks today. They will all be on their way to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. We ship anywhere from Canada down past North Carolina.”

Lovgren grew up trawling the waters off Sandy Hook. He says the fishery is already stressed from rising ocean temperatures. While there used to be dozens of fishing boats here, Lovgren said today there’s only a handful. He worries that if oil and gas companies drill offshore, he’ll be put out of business.

“Blackback flounders are just about extinct in this area here,” he said. “That was a major fishery. yellowtail flounders, codfish, lobsters are disappearing off the Jersey coast and it’s all because the water’s getting too warm.”

Lovgren knows that burning fossil fuels is connected to climate change, warming oceans and his disappearing fish. Still, he said, he needs fossil fuel to trawl the ocean floor.

“Look, a fishing boat, it runs on diesel fuel. You have to have energy. We have to have energy.”

But President Trump’s offshore drilling proposal is an immediate threat to his livelihood, and he’s gearing up to fight it.

Lovgren, along with other fishermen, environmentalists, realtors, and local business owners, descended on a hotel near Trenton Thursday voicing their unified opposition to drilling for oil and natural gas off the coast of New Jersey.

The public meeting,hosted by federal officials from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, comes as the Trump Administration has proposed opening up the entire East Coast to offshore exploration.

But the proposal has little support along the Jersey coast.

“You start putting a bunch of oil rigs out there and it takes away places that we can tow, where we can fish,” Lovgren said. “The main concern is an oil spill.”

Talk to anyone who makes their living along the Jersey shore, whether it’s selling salt water taffy or renting shore houses, and they’ll tell you they don’t want another Deepwater Horizon along the East Coast. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana in 2010 spilled an estimated 171 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, decimating the fisheries and driving away tourists.

“You know if we had a Deepwater Horizon spill down in Delaware,” Lovgren said, “it’s going to come right up off the Jersey shore. It’s going to wash right into Long Island onto the beach. It could be hitting Cape Cod and Nantucket. Now that could be devastating.”

Lovgren voted for President Trump, and still supports him. But not his proposal. He worries seismic testing, which is used to find the oil and gas reserves, would hurt whales and dolphins.

He’s also concerned about potential smaller leaks that don’t make headlines.

And he’s not alone.

Read the full story at NPR’s StateImpact Pennsylvania

 

A Nearly Invisible Oil Spill Threatens Some of Asia’s Richest Fisheries

February 13, 2018 — ZHOUSHAN, China — A fiery collision that sank an Iranian tanker in the East China Sea a month ago has resulted in an environmental threat that experts say is unlike any before: An almost invisible type of petroleum has begun to contaminate some of the most important fishing grounds in Asia, from China to Japan and beyond.

It is the largest oil spill in decades, but the disaster has unfolded outside the glare of international attention that big spills have previously attracted. That is because of its remote location on the high seas and also the type of petroleum involved: condensate, a toxic, liquid byproduct of natural gas production.

Unlike the crude oil in better-known disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon, condensate does not clump into black globules that can be easily spotted or produce heart-wrenching images of animals mired in muck. There’s no visible slick that can be pumped out. Experts said the only real solution is to let it evaporate or dissolve. Absorbed into the water, it will remain toxic for a time, though it will also disperse more quickly into the ocean than crude oil.

Experts say there has never been so large a spill of condensate; up to 111,000 metric tons has poured into the ocean. It has almost certainly already invaded an ecosystem that includes some of the world’s most bountiful fisheries off Zhoushan, the archipelago that rises where the Yangtze River flows into the East China Sea.

The area produced five million tons of seafood of up to four dozen species for China alone last year, according to Greenpeace, including crab, squid, yellow croaker, mackerel and a local favorite, hairtail. If projections are correct, the toxins could soon make their way into equally abundant Japanese fisheries.

Exposure to condensate is extremely unhealthy to humans and potentially fatal. The effects of eating fish contaminated with it remain essentially untested, but experts strongly advise against doing so.

“This is an oil spill of a type we haven’t seen before,” said Paul Johnston, a scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter in England. “Working out the impact is actually a huge task — probably next to impossible.”

For China, the disaster has become a test of its ambitions as a global and regional steward of the seas, especially at a time when it is reinforcing its territorial claims, including disputed territories with Japan in these waters. Given its proximity, China has taken the lead in investigating the disaster and monitoring the spill, but it has faced some criticism for what some see as a slow and inadequate response thus far.

Officials in Beijing announced on Feb. 1 that samples of fish taken within four to five nautical miles of the sunken ship contained traces of petroleum hydrocarbons, suggesting possible condensate contamination; they pledged to expand the range of testing to 90 miles, and closely monitor fish coming into markets.

Read the full story at the New York Times

R.I.’s governor urges opposition to Atlantic offshore drilling plan

February 9, 2018 — Gov. Gina Raimondo is urging Rhode Islanders to speak up against a federal plan that would open waters off the state’s coast to drilling for oil and gas.

In an interview in her State House office, she said the Trump administration’s plan to overturn an Obama-era ban on offshore drilling along the nation’s East Coast poses a threat to Rhode Island’s commercial fishing industry and the beaches along the state’s 400 miles of coastline.

Raimondo said she requested the meeting with The Providence Journal to raise public awareness about the drilling plan. It was the first time in her tenure as governor that she has asked for such a meeting in regard to an environmental issue.

“I find the whole thing to be really quite alarming,” she said. “This might happen if we don’t oppose it loudly enough.”

In January 1996, the barge North Cape spilled 828,000 gallons of home heating oil off Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, killing thousands of shore birds and millions of lobsters.

It is considered one of the worst environmental disasters in Rhode Island history, but the size of the spill was relatively small. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 in Alaska totaled 11 million gallons of crude while the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill may have released up to 20 times that amount into the Gulf of Mexico.

“The greatest concern would be an oil spill,” Raimondo said. “I was in high school when Exxon Valdez happened so I still remember that very vividly. The BP oil spill seems like it was yesterday. That could happen here. I think Rhode Islanders need to know that.”

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically-recoverable oil on the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf and 327 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Less than a tenth of the total potential resources are on the Atlantic coast.

The proposal released by the Department of the Interior in January would take effect from 2019 to 2024. Lease sales for the North Atlantic region would take place in 2021.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

 

California says will block crude oil from Trump offshore drilling plan

February 9, 2018 — SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California will block the transportation through its state of petroleum from new offshore oil rigs, officials told Reuters on Wednesday, a move meant to hobble the Trump administration’s effort to vastly expand drilling in U.S. federal waters.

California’s plan to deny pipeline permits for transporting oil from new leases off the Pacific Coast is the most forceful step yet by coastal states trying to halt the biggest proposed expansion in decades of federal oil and gas leasing.

Officials in Florida, North and South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, have also warned drilling could despoil beaches, harm wildlife and hurt lucrative tourism industries.

“I am resolved that not a single drop from Trump’s new oil plan ever makes landfall in California,” Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, chair of the State Lands Commission and a Democratic candidate for governor, said in an emailed statement.

The commission sent a letter on Wednesday to the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) urging the bureau’s program manager Kelly Hammerle to withdraw the draft proposal, saying the public did not have an adequate opportunity to provide input on the plan.

”It is certain that the state would not approve new pipelines or allow use of existing pipelines to transport oil from new leases onshore,” the commission wrote in the letter seen by Reuters.

California has clashed repeatedly with President Donald Trump’s administration over a range of other issues since last year, from climate change to automobile efficiency standards to immigration.

The Interior Department last month announced its proposal to open nearly all U.S. offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, sparking protests from coastal states, environmentalists and the tourism industry.

Read the full story at Reuters

 

North Carolina governor seeks offshore drilling exemption in Zinke meeting

February 5, 2018 — North Carolina’s governor said he had a good conversation on Saturday with the interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, regarding plans to expand drilling for gas and oil off the state’s coast.

Roy Cooper, a Democrat, wants the Republican administration to give him an exemption similar to that offered to the Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott.

Last month, Zinke told Scott Florida’s waters would remain closed under Donald Trump’s five-year plan, which would open 90% of the nation’s offshore reserves to development by private companies.

Interior officials later said Zinke’s promise was not a formal plan and the proposal was still under review.

At least 10 other governors from both parties have asked Zinke to remove their states from plans to expand offshore drilling from the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific.

Henry McMaster, the Republican governor of South Carolina, had a meeting on Friday with Zinke, his staff reported. Zinke did not meet with reporters after either meeting.

Cooper said he spent an hour talking to Zinke, telling him drilling could cause unrecoverable damage to the state’s $3bn tourism and fishing industries.

“We told him there is no 100% safe method to drill for oil and gas off the coast, particularly in our area off of North Carolina that sees nor’easters, that sees hurricanes,” Cooper said.

“We don’t call it the ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic’ for nothing, it would be catastrophic if there were to be an oil spill.

Read the full story at The Guardian

 

Attorneys general urge offshore drilling plan’s cancellation

February 2, 2018 — The top lawyers for a dozen coastal states want the U.S. Interior Department to cancel the Trump administration’s plan to expand offshore drilling, warning it threatens their maritime economies and natural resources.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and her fellow attorneys general, all Democrats, wrote Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday about his agency’s proposed five-year oil and gas leasing plan that opens new ocean waters.

“Not only does this irresponsible and careless plan put our state’s jobs and environment at risk, but it shows utter disregard for the will and voices of thousands of local businesses and fishing families,” said Healey in a prepared statement. “My colleagues and I will continue to fight this plan.”

Healey first announced her opposition to the plan in an August 2017 letter to Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The Northeast Seafood Coalition and the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association agreed with her that the Interior Department’s plan to expand offshore drilling threatens Massachusetts’ $7.3 billion commercial fishing industry — the third largest in the country — and more than 240,000 jobs in the state.

The plan also could devastate the state’s robust recreation and tourism industries, according to Healey, as well harm the state’s coastal environment and protected endangered species, including the Northern Right Whale, which feeds in the waters off of Cape Cod and Nantucket, according to the comment letter. There are only about 460 critically endangered Northern Right Whales remaining worldwide.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Gulf Shrimp Landings Hit 100 Million lbs. in 2017, an Improvement, but Still 2nd Lowest Since 2010

January 30, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The National Marine Fisheries Service reported their final Gulf of Mexico shrimp landings report for 2017. In December, landings (all species, headless) totaled 6.644 million lbs. compared to 5.848 million in December 2016. This brings the cumulative total to 100.08 million lbs.; 6.25 million pounds or 6.67 percent above the Jan-Dec 2016 total of 93.82 million lbs.

While improved year-over-year, the two most recent efforts are the lowest since 2010; the year of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In that year, the effort May to August was limited by a series of closures.

Individually, the two largest fisheries, Louisiana and Texas, moved in opposite directions. 2017 landings in Louisiana were 13 percent below the prior year and 26.5 percent below the 5-year average. The fishery struggled in the late summer and through the fall amid an active hurricane season. Conversely, landings in Texas were up 23.76 percent when compared to a year ago and 2.67 percent when compared to the 5-year average. Throughout the year, the fishery remained in-line or above the prior 5-year average; attributable in-part to Louisiana boats seeking opportunities in Texas.

The smaller fisheries in Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida West Coast were all improved year-over-year; with notable strength in Alabama.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.