A Management Tool and Strategy for Agriculture Development in Offshore United States Coastal Waters

Our OASIS tool will support government agencies and potential investors, developers, and operators by providing a sophisticated and comprehensive management tool and by applying advanced system engineering techniques to offshore aquaculture development in the United States. The major near-term impediments to offshore aquaculture development are centered, first, on the regulatory bottleneck driven primarily by environmental and health concerns, and, second, on the lack of definitive economic information on the farms and industry that might eventually develop. The OASIS Model can be used to make effective decisions to resolve the potential conflict between the development of a robust offshore aquaculture industry and the concerns about associated environmental and socio-economic impacts. It will enable multiple levels of analysis ranging from individual farm design to industry-level implications. By incorporating a sophisticated optimization procedure to determine the most efficient development strategies, application of the tool will make farmed fish products more competitive in the marketplace, both in the U.S. and abroad. We believe that this model along with our system engineering methodology represent a powerful approach to aquaculture development and can be adapted to the design and analysis of a wide variety of offshore aquaculture ventures in the United States. If this SBIR project provides information and technology that accelerates the permitting of U.S. offshore aquaculture farms in any reasonable way, the potential payoff is huge as evidenced by the estimated size of the current industry, more than $1B. Offshore aquaculture offers the primary hope for helping to alleviate the U.S. seafood trade deficit, estimated at about $8 billion, which is second only to oil.