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Anyone walking down New Bedford’s Pier 3 can see the state of the commercial scalloping fleet, rusty trawlers and all. Less obvious are the subtle sheens of “mystery” oil spills leaking into the harbor’s waters.
Trace amounts of diesel and other fossil fuels — especially in older boats — can leak into the vessel’s bilge water and spill into the ocean, where their origins are nearly impossible to trace. These spills can impact water quality and get stuck in the harbor sediment.
At one point, Buzzards Bay Coalition estimated that these so-called “mystery” spills occur in the harbor once every eight days. Coalition President Mark Rasmussen believes that number is likely higher.
“Those are just the spills that are reported,” Rasmussen said. “It’s considered commonplace in a lot of spots of the harbor here to see oil in a way that just doesn’t happen in other places.”
These spills average between 5 and 20 gallons of oil per spill, Rasmussen added.
Although harbor workers and local officials are required by law to report oil spills or visible sheens to the U.S. Coast Guard, these smaller spills often go undetected, Rasmussen said, either dispersing on their own or sinking into the sediment on the harbor floor.
These spills are particularly common among the aging scallop fleet. Many scallop boats are between 30 and 50 years old, making it one of the oldest fleets in the U.S., behind Pacific salmon trolling boats.
The problem is worse in New Bedford than in other ports, in part because it doesn’t have a facility to pump oily bilge out of boats.
The oil pollution also brings up long-term questions: how can New Bedford’s fishing fleet adapt to use less diesel fuel? And someday, could the fishing fleet even go electric?
The harbor loses its pump-out program
The harbor’s oil spill problem has gotten worse in the past two years, because of the loss of a pump-out program that allowed fishermen to empty out their oily bilges before they leaked into the harbor.
From 2015 to 2022, the Buzzards Bay Coalition operated the pump-out program, funded by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. The mobile service allowed captains to empty out their vessels’ bilges using a vacuum truck. John Verissimo, a former fisherman and Vineyard Wind consultant, joined the program early on. Between 2015 and 2019, Verissimo emptied 140,062 gallons of bilge water, diverting 34,449 gallons of oil from potentially spilling into New Bedford’s waters.
When the coalition lost the funding to continue, Verissimo offered the service himself at a reduced price until 2024.
Verissimo applied for funding to the state’s Fisheries Innovation Fund to continue the bilge pump-out program, but found out in November that he did not receive a grant.
“That was a very important thing,” Verissimo said of the pump-out program. “The boats really, really depended on it because the cost of doing a private pump-out is in the thousands.”
With a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Buzzards Bay Coalition is looking to install a permanent dockside bilge pump on New Bedford Harbor, but real estate is the main barrier at the crowded port, Rasmussen said.
“In other ports, you have a facility where anybody can pull up to the dock and pump off [a boat’s] oily bilge,” Rasmussen said. “We just have to make that part of that regular routine that vessels are regularly following.”
Gordon Carr, the executive director of the New Bedford Port Authority, confirmed that the harbor currently doesn’t have the space for such a facility, but he said he would have liked to see the pump-out program continue. Often, Carr said, the Port Authority won’t respond to oil sheens that dissipate on their own, saving its resources for larger spills.
“Zero tolerance isn’t really an option,” Carr said. “These things are going to happen from time to time.”
The state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs has recorded 35 reported oil spills in New Bedford Harbor since 2021. Rasmussen believes that’s an undercount.
Chris Reddy is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Falmouth with more than 25 years studying oil spills and their effects on the environment. In a place like New Bedford, which already has a well-documented history of harbor contamination, toxins from these spills can sink down and settle into the sediment on the harbor floor, he said.
“Now you have almost warehoused [the oil], and fish and shellfish that live in that sediment can actually take up some of that load, and you end up having toxicants in your shellfish,” Reddy said.
Electric bugaboo
Oil spills aren’t the only environmental hazard stemming from commercial fishing vessels. According to the city’s air quality monitoring system, the industrial harbor has some of the poorest air quality in the city, second only to the neighborhoods surrounding the New Bedford Regional Airport.
Recent studies — and fishermen’s own reports — have shown that fishing vessels are spending more time traveling than they used to, both to follow scallop fisheries’ creep northwards and to dodge offshore wind development leasing areas. Both these factors mean that captains burn through fuel faster, fisherman Tony Alvernaz said, hurting both the environment and vessel owners’ bottom lines.
With all of the pitfalls of fossil fuel travel, some may wonder why fishermen don’t electrify their vessels, like more and more car owners have. But fishermen say their industry has a long way to go before it can part with fossil fuels.
Sarah Schumann is a commercial groundfish crew member based in Rhode Island and the founder of the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign. In response to skyrocketing diesel prices and the growth of offshore wind, Schumann formed the campaign to give members of the commercial fishing industry a voice in their own climate solutions.
Schumann’s campaign has partnered with the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Development Program to form Energy Efficient Fisheries, a federally funded program to assess the industry’s energy needs and find ways to lower diesel dependency.
Leveraging her degree in climate and environmental policy, Schumann surveyed fishermen on what they would need to lower their carbon emissions.
Most, if not all, were deeply reluctant to try new and unproven electric engines, Schumann said. There is currently no electric technology that can last for long voyages away from a charging station. Most importantly, Schumann added, crews must be able to fix any engine problem on the fly — often on the open ocean, in extreme weather.
The weight of electric batteries today would severely cut into the vessel’s overall capacity, meaning each vessel could transport much less fish in one trip. Verissimo pointed out that the harbor can’t currently accommodate enough charging stations for the entire fleet.
In California, state regulators have managed to push decarbonization forward by mandating the availability of alternative fuels such as biodiesel, which is derived from plants instead of fossil fuels.
States receive federal funding for low-carbon transportation projects through the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA). Rhode Island has used a lot of that funding to make its commercial fishing fleet more fuel-efficient, Schumann said.
Massachusetts, on the other hand, has prioritized full conversions of land-based vehicles from diesel engines to electric ones, focusing on vehicles like the MBTA bus fleet that can more easily go electric. To date, no fishing vessels or harbor craft in Massachusetts have received grant funding under the DERA program, even though boats are technically eligible.
Even if the technology and the fleet were there, Verissimo pointed out that the infrastructure needed — charging stations and the like — would take years longer to fill out.
“Look at the problems you’ve got with electric cars,” Verissimo said. “Think about that on a fishing boat.”
Hybrid solutions
The future of carbon-free fishing may not be on the horizon, but it’s not too far, either. This January, in the frigid waters of Sitka, Alaska, a commercial fishing vessel named the Mirage took its maiden voyage as the first hybrid-powered fishing boat in Alaska’s waters.
The retrofitted engine, produced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the Rockies (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories, is capable of switching between electric and diesel to reduce diesel usage by 80 percent. In Alaska, where fuel is much more expensive than in other ports, this fuel efficiency can lead to real savings for commercial fishermen, NREL’s principal investigator, Michael Lammert, said in an email.
Lammert envisions that this hybrid technology could eventually be used on other fishing vessels and harborcraft. Tugboats, for example, don’t often operate at peak efficiency when carrying lighter loads, which is when the electric engine could kick in.
“The actual fishing operation is often at a near idle engine speed, where the engine is least efficient,” Lammert said of Alaska’s salmon trollers. “So the vessel is burning far more fuel than should be required.”
By using electricity while idling, hybrid engines can also cut down on the amount of harmful diesel emissions crews breathe in. The technology is promising, Lammert said, but still many years away from widespread adoption.
Based on the results of her survey, Schumann recommended that regulators work collaboratively with fishermen to produce a “menu” of options to reduce diesel usage.
In some fisheries, that could mean regulatory changes allowing permit-stacking, a measure that would allow fishermen to take more trips on fewer boats and save fuel, Schumann said. A group of scallop fishermen backed by New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell has recently revived talks to allow permit-stacking after rejection of a similar proposal four years ago.
These types of changes, along with incentives for lower-carbon technology, allow fishermen to naturally choose more sustainable ways of fishing, Schumann said.
“A lot of times, in order for us to fish more efficiently, we actually need the government to let us fish more efficiently,” Schumann said.
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
