Saving Seafood

Recreational fishing has a data problem

April 8, 2024 — Governing bodies across the East Coast are rolling out this year’s limits on recreational saltwater fishing.

Why it matters: Some of those regulations are quite restrictive, and based partly on federal data that everyone knows is wrong.

  • Recreational fishing is no small business, generating over $100 billion annually in sales impacts and supporting nearly 640,000 jobs.

The big picture: Every year, assessments are made on the health of species, namely around how abundant a specific type of fish is, and how popular it is to catch.

  • When done right, the assessments are vital to preserving the country’s fish stocks.
  • The goal is to prevent anglers from overfishing a species. They should exist in enough numbers to naturally sustain, if not grow, their natural population.
  • That job has fallen to NOAA, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, since at least 1979.

Read the full article at AXIOS

States edge closer to regional fund for fishermen hurt by offshore wind projects

February 10, 2024 –A regional fund that would pay fishermen for damages caused by offshore wind is one step closer to being established. A New York state energy agency, in collaboration with Massachusetts and nine other East Coast states, took a concrete step Thursday toward establishing that fund.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority issued a request for proposals seeking a firm to design and develop the regional fund and a standardized claims process for the fishing industry. The process would apply regardless of which wind project caused the economic loss.

In as few as 16 months, the states hope to have a claims process established, a third-party administrator selected, and millions of dollars from offshore wind developers that can be doled out to affected fishermen of any Eastern port as needed. The fund is a response to several projects that are slated to come online along the Northeast amid a lack of any national solution.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

ASMFC Approves Plan to Rebuild Striped Bass Population

January 30, 2024 — To combat the declining striped bass population on the East Coast, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) has adopted a new fisheries management plan known as Addendum II. This plan introduces critical changes in recreational and commercial fishing practices across Atlantic Coast states, aiming to reduce striped bass mortality and rebuild their numbers.

The update to the management plan follows the ASMFC’s emergency action last year, which reduced the maximum size limit for striped bass in recreational fishing to 31 inches. The decision reflects growing concerns over the dwindling striped bass population, which is attributed to various factors, including overfishing, environmental challenges, and climate change.

Opponents say Dominion’s offshore wind farm endangers whales. Scientists reject the claim.

December 11, 2023 — A series of whale deaths along the East Coast early this year has spurred an ongoing dispute over the burgeoning offshore wind industry.

Several of the deaths happened in Virginia Beach and Cape Charles. Two were humpbacks; one was a critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, later determined to have been struck by a vessel. Another right whale was also caught entangled in fishing line off the Outer Banks.

Around the same time, more than a dozen humpback whales were found dead along the coasts of New Jersey and New York over the span of a few months – the latest in what scientists call an “unusual mortality event” stretching back to 2016. Warming waters driven by climate change are bringing humpbacks closer to shore, while cargo shipments carried on big ships are also on the rise.

Scientists later said most of the deaths were caused by ship strikes.

But some local politicians and national conservative pundits pointed the finger somewhere else: offshore wind development.

More than a dozen offshore wind projects are in various stages of permitting along the East Coast. The Biden administration considers the nascent industry a key part of its climate policy, setting a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of electricity generated from offshore wind farms by 2030, or enough to power more than 10 million homes.

In January, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused offshore wind projects of killing “a huge number of whales” on his show. Fox News also linked the right whale death in Virginia Beach to Dominion Energy’s project.

Thirty mayors in New Jersey called for a moratorium on offshore wind activity until further investigation into the whale deaths. The uproar also fueled a few “save the whales” rallies, including in New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Read the full article at WHRO

Where is glauconite, the seafloor mineral challenging offshore wind?

November 13, 2023 — As offshore wind developers run into glauconite, a mineral that presents challenges for wind turbine installation, the U.S. Geological Survey is conducting a monthslong study to identify exactly where glauconite is already known to be.

The study began in early summer, after some offshore wind developers found glauconite on parts of the seafloor they’ve leased for wind farms — a series of discoveries that The Light reported on last month. Government geologists will focus on a variety of seafloor features that might challenge renewable energy infrastructure, including shallow pockets of natural gas and underwater landslides as well as glauconite.

In the coming months, scientists will review data from the last wide-scale effort to sample the U.S. Atlantic seafloor for glauconite — which happened in the 1960s and 1970s.

“This is a study that doesn’t involve collecting new data,” said Laura Brothers, a marine geologist with the Geological Survey, in an interview with The Light. “We’re going to be combing through all the publicly available and trusted sources of data regarding things that can be hazardous for infrastructure placement and development offshore.”

The study will also examine glauconite deposits on land. “We’ll look at where glauconite is known to occur onshore and what layers of rocks are known to have it,” Brothers said, “to get the best idea we can about where it can be offshore. It’s kind of the best we can do without collecting a substantial amount of new data.”

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

Decline of rare right whale appears to be slowing, but scientists say big threats remain

October 23, 2023 — The decline of one of the rarest whales in the world appears to be slowing, but scientists warn the giant mammals still face existential threats from warming oceans, ship collisions and entanglement in fishing gear.

The population of North Atlantic right whales, which live off the U.S. East Coast, fell by about 25% from 2010 to 2020 and was down to only about 364 whales as of 2021. Now the whales are at around 356 in total, according to a group of scientists, industry members and government officials who study them.

This suggests the population is potentially levelling off, as equal numbers of whales could be entering the population as are being killed, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium said Monday. However, getting an accurate count of the aquatic creatures involves certain ranges of error, which put estimates for 2021 and 2022 at roughly around the same number.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

A tricky, sticky mineral that’s challenging offshore wind developers

October 22, 2o23 — Offshore wind developers are encountering an unexpected challenge on the East Coast seafloor: a crushable, green mineral called glauconite, sometimes precisely where they plan to install wind turbines. The mineral — which dates back to the age of the dinosaurs — is weaker and less predictable than sand, scientists say, presenting a new engineering puzzle for researchers and wind developers to solve.

Glauconite’s behavior poses a “significant risk” to offshore wind development, said a paper published this year by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the lead regulator of offshore wind. It said glauconite formations are “abundant” along the continental shelf, and that wind developers will “inevitably” encounter the material during construction.

At least two developers have run into the mineral in a total of three offshore wind projects — two south of Massachusetts and one south of Long Island, New York. In a document published last month, BOEM wrote that the geotechnical properties of the mineral make it an “extremely difficult material to build upon,” specifically for fixed-bottom wind turbines.

Glauconite’s presence has already caused BOEM to reject proposed wind turbine layouts that might have minimized a project’s potential effects on marine life and the fishing industry.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

The headwinds and tailwinds affecting offshore wind in the Northeast, explained

October 5, 2023 — There’s a lot happening in the offshore wind world right now, especially in the Northeast. And depending on what articles you read, the industry is booming or teetering on financial failure.

The reality is probably somewhere in between. There are headwinds and tailwinds, producing what one person in the industry described as “whiplash in headlines.”

Making sense of it all can be tough. But the stakes are high: Climate change is happening and electricity demand in the region is projected to rise precipitously over the next decade as people buy electric vehicles and heat pumps.

Several New England states, plus New York and New Jersey, are counting on offshore wind to help meet their decarbonization and electrification goals — not to mention banking on the industry to create clean energy jobs and revitalize once-thriving port cities like New Bedford and New London.

A year and a half ago, things looked rosy for offshore wind. States signed 20-year contracts for cheap electricity. Companies announced or started to build manufacturing facilities to help create a domestic supply chain for the industry. Even the Cape Wind controversy of the 2010s seemed more and more like a hiccup in the story of the American offshore wind revolution.

But then came a global inflation crisis, new supply chain disruptions and a growing movement of people calling for a pause on offshore wind development as dead humpback whales washed up on beaches.

Read the full article at wbur

More whales are dying. Conspiracies are leading to threats against the rescue teams

October 4, 2023 — For the past seven years, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service has been monitoring a spike in whale strandings along the entire East Coast.

The agency has declared the ongoing situation an “unusual mortality event,” or UME, for humpback whales. More than 200 humpback strandings have been reported since 2016 along the eastern seaboard, from Maine to Florida.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries Department says it has conducted partial or full necropsy examinations on about half the whales, with 40 per cent of those examinations showing evidence of human interaction, such as entanglement or ship strikes.

But theories about offshore wind energy projects contributing to the deaths have risen alongside the strandings, despite the NOAA rejecting those claims.

Read the full article at Calgary Herald

U.S. offshore wind slammed by runaway costs

September 11, 2023 — The U.S. offshore wind industry, banking on a big boost from the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, has found itself face-to-face with a major hurdle that’s been right there in the name all along: inflation.

In fact, the law might even be making it worse.

More than 10 gigawatts of offshore wind projects along the U.S. East Coast – the equivalent of roughly 10 nuclear power reactors – are at serious risk as higher costs force developers to re-crunch the numbers for proposals originally modeled years ago, before a run-up in interest rates and material costs. Orsted, the Danish wind giant, said this week it’s prepared to walk away from projects unless it gets even more government aid. Other developers are already paying tens of millions in penalties to exit contracts they say no longer make financial sense.

“It’s pretty evident that inflationary pressures have blunted the impact” of the IRA, said Josh Price, a director with Capstone, a Washington-based research group. “It wasn’t a silver bullet.”

Orsted’s warnings are the most concrete example yet of the limits of the IRA, which was hailed as a key driver for America’s nascent offshore wind industry. While the law provides at least $370 billion in grants, tax credits, and other incentives for climate and clean energy projects, that’s proving no match for rising inflation and borrowing costs. And by dangling higher incentives for companies sourcing U.S.-made parts, it’s fueling demand before the domestic supply chain catches up, driving prices higher still.

Read the full article at the Portland Press Herald