The financial impacts of moving finfish and bivalve farms from protected nearshore waters to exposed offshore waters has been the topic of much debate. Some point to stable temperatures and oxygen levels, lower parasites loads, high assimilative capacities allowing for more densely stocked pens, and lower user conflicts enabling larger farms as reasons why open ocean farms will be more profitable than their coastal counterparts, while others look at the increased capital costs, more difficult operations, and higher risk and believe open ocean farms will experience higher costs. The answer is difficult to ascertain since there are zero publicly traded companies focused on open ocean production creating an information gap in real-world financial results from a commercial scale open ocean facility. What data does exist is highly influenced by the region the farm is located in, the species being farmed, the business strategy, the strength of management, and a significant amount of randomness, making it difficult to find representative data for future projects, particularly in the United States.
Filling this gap is an important step towards advancing an open ocean aquaculture industry as entrepreneurs have little data on which to build business plans and (possibly more importantly) investors and lenders have few resources to turn to to evaluate business plans.
Farm-scale economic models are valuable although imperfect tools to address this need. The authors created a model built on real farms in varying ocean states to assess the financial impacts of moving along the ocean energy continuum from highly protected to fully exposed sites, controlling for some of the main confounding factors such as technology type, species, etc. The results are presented here along with a spatial analysis of CapEx costs and discussions on trends, context, and future outlook.