Kona-based company Ocean Era recently received approval for a first-of-its-kind aquaculture pilot project off of the Gulf Coast of Florida.

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Kona-based company Ocean Era recently received approval for a first-of-its-kind aquaculture pilot project off of the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Titled the Velella Epsilon project, it will be located in federal waters about 40 miles out from Sarasota, with the goal of cultivating 20,000 red drum fish over the course of a year in a submerged net system.

Ocean Era previously ran similar demonstration projects off the West Hawaii coast from 2011 to 2014, producing two batches of approximately 2,000 kampachi fish each.

Founder and CEO Neil Anthony Sims also helped establish the Blue Ocean Mariculture Farm off of Kona, which has now been in operation for over 20 years.

“I think it’s a beautiful validation that offshore aquaculture — when it’s done right, when it’s located in the proper sort of environment, and when it’s well-managed — can produce great tasting seafood with minimal impact,” Sims said.

He said in addition to producing large, healthy fish, the Kona projects showed that the offshore pens also attract other fish, creating a hotspot for fishers.

“The two real take-home messages were that the fish growth performance was phenomenal. The fish grew really fast. They were really healthy. Out in deeper water, the fish are really happy,” he said. “And then the other take-home message was that the local fishing community just loved these things. They became phenomenal fish aggregating devices.”

Following the success of these projects, Sims said, he wanted to explore expanding the company’s aquaculture reach, which is where the plans for the Florida project came in.

“We realized the way to really carry this message to the continental U.S. and really have some impact was to put a demonstration project somewhere in federal waters,” Sims said. “We’d said the Gulf would be a great place to be able to do a demonstration project and have the Florida fishing and boating community actually see for themselves (that) offshore aquaculture is really just fish in the water,” he said.

In collaboration with Florida-based environmental consulting company GulfStream Aquaculture, Ocean Era began the permitting process for the project in 2018. The final required permit was just approved this month, eight years later.

While support for aquaculture has increased from national and international groups over the past few decades, GulfStream Aquaculture principal Dennis Peters said there was still some skepticism and resistance from several local nonprofits in the Gulf Coast region, which contributed, in part, to the long process.

“The opposition, where there’s opportunity for appeals, civil suits, and so forth … that is what really compounded the eight years or a lot of the eight years of delay that we experienced,” he said.

Complaints included concerns about water quality and ecosystem impacts, all of which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bodies ultimately dismissed. Sims said his company has worked to address these concerns and ensure that there will not be negative impacts from the project, citing his Hawaii experience as evidence.

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“We will monitor that very closely in the demonstration project, because that’s part of what we want to demonstrate to folks. … We are very confident there’s going to be no significant impact on water quality or on the seabed underneath the pen,” he said.”And the reason for that is that we have 20 years of experience with the offshore farm here in Kona.”

Peters said that monitoring of the project’s environmental impact will be done by the University of Miami and be publicly disclosed.

“We have very rigorous and strict environmental requirements for monitoring, and we want to make that information available to the public in real time as best we can, based on when it’s analyzed and when it’s been made available to us,” he said. “We want to be as transparent as we possibly can.”

In addition to showing the potential of off-shore aquaculture, Sims said the project has also served another demonstration purpose: that the current permitting process is too arduous to meet the need to develop more sustainable seafood practices in the country.

“As a demonstration project, it has been very successful, and it’s demonstrated that the system doesn’t work. We need to have regulatory reform,” he said, adding that a bill called the Marine Aquaculture Research for America Act, would expand opportunities for more projects.

The majority of seafood consumed in the US is currently imported. Sims, a former fisheries biologist, said there is a pressing need to find ways to produce more locally.

“The environmentally responsible thing to do is to grow our own seafood … .” he said. “Whenever we’re just relying on wild stocks, it’s really limited in how much we can grow … we need to be able to nurture what we want to take from the ocean, rather than just taking what’s there. We need to be able to produce the food that we need.”

Sims said the Vellela Epsilon project initially received funding from NOAA’s SeaGrant program nine years ago, but, due to increased costs, more money is now needed to make it a reality.

“There’s been a little bit of inflation between now and then,” he said. “So, we need to find some additional funding to allow us to do the full 12-month grow-out.”

He and Peters said they hope to have funding secured and the project up and running in early 2027. Sims said that along with bringing more visibility to aquaculture, he hopes to highlight Hawaii’s role in the industry.

“I think that Hawaii can be really proud of the leadership role that we have taken in offshore aquaculture, and we like to think that there’s a lot more that we can do,” Sims said.

He said Ocean Era is also in the process of applying for permits for an off-shore farm off of Ewa Beach on Oahu.

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Email Grace Inez Adams at [email protected].