Three months after cutting bait on plans to build a $500 million fish factory in Belfast, Maine, Nordic Aquafarms is courting new investors and facing a longer, more complicated timeline for a similar project along Humboldt Bay.In a recent interview, Nordic executives outlined some new permitting and environmental mitigation hurdles and said it will likely be “a few years” before the company can demolish the old pulp mill infrastructure on the Samoa Peninsula and break ground on its proposed recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) facility. Announced more than six years ago, the land-based fish farm, as originally conceived, is expected to cost $650 million and employ up to 150 full-time workers while producing up to 27,000 metric tons of Yellowtail kingfish per year — enough to supply West Coast markets from Seattle to Los Angeles and beyond.However, given the recent geopolitical upheaval and its impact on world financial markets, the future of any project with such a long timeline is uncertain, as the company saw in Maine. Nordic’s East Coast project, announced in 2018, received all required local, state and federal permits but faced fierce opposition from environmental groups, whose legal challenges ultimately proved too costly.“The company exits after tens of millions of investment dollars and many years of planning and permitting in the State of Maine,” CEO Brenda Chandler said in a January press release.Last week, Chandler and local Project Manager Scott Thompson sat down for an interview at Outpost headquarters in Old Town Eureka. They said that while the project is progressing, certain steps may take longer than anticipated.Environmental mitigation, for example. Nordic recently committed to an extensive Marine Monitoring Survey Plan that requires up to five years of water quality sampling and marine ecosystem analysis near the business end of an outfall pipe, which will discharge treated effluent from the RAS facility into the ocean, roughly a mile and a half offshore. That monitoring plan recently received approved from the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.Even with these new mitigation measures, local environmental groups remain wary. Jennifer Kalt, executive director of Humboldt Waterkeeper, said her organization is still concerned that the nutrient discharge from the ocean outfall pipe could increase the risk of toxic algae blooms, especially during marine heat waves like the one from 2014-16, nicknamed “The Blob.”Kalt said she’s grateful for the Marine Monitoring Survey Plan.“All we have to go on now is modeling, so the monitoring is really important to understand what is really happening in the ocean once the project is up and running,” she said.Read More
