Invasive Species

One of the biggest threats to the nation’s aquatic and marine environments is the invasion and proliferation of non-native plants and animals, which can crowd out valuable native species and significantly disrupt commerce. One of the most troublesome species to invade the United States, the zebra mussel, has propagated throughout the Great Lakes and several river systems, consuming the food supply and fouling vessels and infrastructure – for example, clogging intake pipes at power plants and water-consuming facilities. The Center for Invasive Species Research at the University of California-Riverside has estimated that the cost of managing zebra mussels in the Great Lakes alone is more than $500 million a year. According to the FWS, $120 billion to $137 billion is spent annually in the United States to address the problems associated with invasive species.

The zebra mussel and other aquatic intruders almost certainly were introduced to North America in ballast water – water drawn from where a ship begins a voyage and held in tanks below decks in order to deepen the ship’s draft and improve navigability. In the Great Lakes, cargo vessels arriving via the St. Lawrence Seaway, before the United States and Canada launched strict regulatory regimes, discharged ballast water from all over the world.

Under the National Contingency Plan, the Coast Guard’s captains of the port are the predesignated federal on-scene coordinators for all oil and hazardous incidents in coastal (and some inland) areas.

Under federal law, the Coast Guard is charged with establishing regulations and guidelines to control the invasion of aquatic nuisance species. Since 2004, the Coast Guard has overseen a mandatory ballast water management program to prevent the introduction and spread of these species, but the primary tactic available to vessels under the program – the exchange of coastal or freshwater ballast for water from the open ocean, conducted while in transit – has been acknowledged as an interim measure, inherently unsafe for many vessels. Because of a variety of factors – the roughness of the sea or a vessel’s age, design, or load – many vessels are necessarily exempted from having to empty their ballast tanks while at sea. The effectiveness of exchanges in removing invasive species, also, is highly variable from vessel to vessel and voyage to voyage.

The Coast Guard and other environmental agencies have long understood that the only practical solution for safe and effective ballast water management is to develop an enforceable standard for the level of potentially invasive organisms contained in a vessel’s ballast water discharge – typically, a defined number of organisms per given volume of ballast. While the commercial sector has developed systems that use a number of technologies – including ozonation, cyclonic separation, electrochlorination, ultraviolet filtration, and ferrate disinfectant – the Coast Guard, in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has worked to develop a regulatory discharge standard while rigorously evaluating these systems.

The complex, painstaking process recently produced two important outcomes in the federal fight against invasive species: First, in spring 2012, the Coast Guard published its final ballast water management requirements to apply to all new ships constructed during or after December 2013, as well as to existing ships from 2014 onward, with compliance dates phased in according to their ballast water capacity. The “Ballast Water Final Rule” established a standard for the allowable concentration of living organisms in the ballast water discharged into U.S. waters, and provided vessels with several options for meeting this standard:

1. Installing and operating a ballast water management system (BWMS) that has been approved by the Coast Guard.
2. Performing complete ballast water exchanges in an area 200 nautical miles from any shore prior to discharging ballast water, unless the vessel is required to employ an approved BWMS.
3. Using only water from a U.S. public water system as ballast water. Vessels exercising this option must meet certain tank cleanliness requirements, and use public water exclusively.
4. Retaining ballast water shipboard and refraining from discharge into U.S. waters.
5. Discharging all ballast water to an onshore facility or another vessel for treatment.

Until the spring of 2013, vessels could not implement the first requirement, as the Coast Guard had not yet approved ballast water management systems for use. The “Final Rule” established a process for approving BWMS by technology type – but that process is still under way within the Coast Guard’s network of approved laboratories.

In April, the Coast Guard approved an interim measure that will allow vessel operators to use an on board BWMS that meets the standards established by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO). Cmdr. Ryan Allain, chief of the Coast Guard’s Environmental Standards Division, chose his words carefully when explaining the measure: “The Coast Guard has not type-approved any ballast water management systems yet,” he said. “What the Coast Guard has done is to temporarily accept ballast water treatment systems that have been type-approved by another foreign administration. We have accepted those to be used in our waters as a practice they can put into place in lieu of carrying out ballast water exchange.”

According to Allain, manufacturers of these interim treatment systems, known as alternate management systems (AMS), can secure temporary approval by applying to the Coast Guard. “We give those a temporary allowance to be used in U.S. waters as an interim measure until a ship can install a Coast Guard type-approved system,” he said. While the service continues to evaluate BWMS at its laboratories, and to consider AMS applications, the Environmental Standards Division is busy, Allain said, “communicating our policy and regulation to industry, and really trying to get the ball rolling so we can start getting these ballast water systems installed on ships.”