BREAKING NEWS: State's highest court deals huge blow to Down East industrial salmon farm

BELFAST, Feb. 16, 2023 - The five-member Maine Supreme Court announced today it has ruled unanimously against a proposed land-based salmon farm here on every count of an appeal by citizens groups.

The court over-turned five lower court rulings to settle ownership of mudflats over which Nordic Aquafarms had planned to run pipes to dump water and waste into Belfast and Penobscot bays from its proposed $500 million project.

The conclusion of the Court’s 31-page decision puts it very simply:
“For the reasons given above, we hold that the deed conveying land to Poor (previous owner) did not include the intertidal land and that this intertidal land was eventually conveyed to Mabee and Grace.” Furthermore, owners Jeffrey R Mabee and Judith B. Grace held a conservation easement over that land prohibiting such industrial activity, the court ruled.

A spokesman for the citizens group said,

“Today’s decision by the Law Court confirms that Jeffrey Mabee and Judith Grace are the rightful owners of the mudflats Nordic wanted for the pipelines in and out of its proposed fish factory. The conservation easement between Mabee-Grace and the Friends of Harriet L. Hartley Conservation Area is now legally valid and fully enforceable.”

HLH President Sid Block said this after learning of the decision from attorney Kim Ervin Tucker:

“Thank goodness justice has prevailed. We are proud to have been part of a large group of citizens who believe that our environment is worth fighting for.”

You may read the entire 31-page ruling here. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZZXySQ_UpwWPp6mjYOYqqV4Ycba37AUz/view?usp=sharing

The ruling is the second major setback for industrial fin fish farming efforts in Maine, after American Aquafarms’s failed attempt last year to seek permits to operate two massive farms in the middle of Frenchman Bay within view of Acadia National Park.

The ruling was also another black eye for the state and the Town of Belfast as they sided with Nordic against the citizens. The QSJ has reported previously of the attempts of both the LePage and Mills administrations to give foreign aquafarming enterprises white glove treatment without input from local towns.

Other groups who joined the opposition here included Upstream Watch and the Maine Lobstering Union.

Two other industrial fish farms in Maine are also facing head winds.

Whole Oceans was the first of the state’s four large-scale projects to actually put a shovel into the ground last June, but that was only to clear debris from the site - an old paper mill site in Bucksport. Construction of the farm has not actually begun, leading to speculation that the project does not have enough investor support.

Kingfish Maine, the Jonesport-based farm aimed to raise yellowtail, is also tied up in legal challenges. Its CEO stepped down last October, and the parent company in Norway recently named a new CEO to stem a collapse in stock price.

Nordic has had its own internecine politics, apart from its external challenges. The company’s Norwegian founder and brainchild of the Belfast project, Erik Heim, left the company last year, replaced by its North American chief financial officer.

He recently resurfaced to propose building a 10,000-ton land-based salmon farm in Millinocket, site of a previous project which was abandoned.

“Xcelerate Aqua, the company founded by former Nordic Aquafarms President and Co-Founder Erik Heim and former Nordic Aquafarms Executive Vice President Marianne Naess, has announced plans for a new salmon recirculating aquaculture system in Millinocket, on the site of the former Great Northern Paper Co. mill,” according to a press release.

Naess told SeafoodSource that the first phase of the project, dubbed Katahdin Salmon, will have a capacity of 5,000 metric tons (MT) of Atlantic salmon a year, with a future phase 2 adding on an additional 5,000 MT of capacity.

The site will include feed storage, a hatchery, growout facilities, and the supporting infrastructure for those operations including processing, oxygen storage, back-up power, and a digester for bio waste. 

Naess – who is the co-founder and CEO of Katahdin Salmon – said the initial project costs are estimated between USD 120 million and USD 140 million (EUR 112 million and EUR 131 million), but she also added that the company is “being careful” with final estimates, recognizing that construction costs over the past few years have fluctuated, according to Seafood Source.

The official site of the new facility will be the former settling lagoons at the paper mill, once used for wastewater treatment. The site is an EPA brownfield location with access to 100 percent renewable energy in the form of local hydropower, and at 1,400 acres total the mill site has enough room to recycle all the company’s waste products on site.

Shane Flynn, who works in tenant recruitment for One North – the team working to recruit businesses to the former paper mill site – said the site selection came about after One North took Heim and Naess on a tour of some of the available facilities. Flynn said he was familiar with their work on Nordic Aquafarms, and some of the challenges that that project faced, and had encouraged them to take a look at Millinocket.

“I have known Marianne and Erik for several years, and I’ve watched carefully how they have progressed during that process, and seeing some of the challenges that have cropped up,” Flynn told SeafoodSource. “I said, quite a number of times, ‘you know, you need to come up and look at what we’ve got in Millinocket.’”

Heim and Naess finally took Flynn up on his offer of a tour in July, and realized the opportunity available in the settling lagoons.

“We went through the site – you know it’s a big site, there’s 1,400 acres so there’s a lot on it – but we looked at what we thought were likely locations if there were to be any business,” Flynn said. “Then as a kind of default, we went by our lagoon area, where the settling lagoons were for the wastewater treatment. And it was at that point that that which was seen as a challenging location within the site, Marianne and Erik saw as a great opportunity.”

It will be interesting to see if state permits will come so easily this time around for Heim and Naess.