Open-ocean aquaculture is severely constrained by high levels of risk and uncertainty for developers, insurers, investors, and regulators, which leads to prohibitively high capital and operating expenditures and slow permitting. Increasing mariculture production will require expansion into more exposed offshore farms. While such farms can be highly productive, engineering farms in exposed ocean conditions introduces compounding sources of risk and uncertainty.
Simplistic approaches to load case identification can be overly conservative (Figure 1), resulting in unnecessary capital expenditure costs. The complex interplay between site factors such as wave, wind, currents, biomass, water level, and species-dependent factors require multi-dimensional risk quantification. Interactions among structural factors such as anchor installation, anchor strength, rope performance, and biomass hydrodynamics, and their related uncertainties, must also be considered. Furthermore, biomass hydrodynamics are dependent on a myriad of factors and ongoing analysis of full-scale farms, compared to numerical models, shows that an understanding of the hydrodynamics of the biomass of the farm is essential to accurate engineering of the farm. A comprehensive, quantified, approach to these combined risk factors is essential for designing aquaculture operations that are simultaneously robust and economically sustainable.