Identifying Profitable Deep Water Tasmanian Oyster Farming Leases

This project addresses a key question within the Tasmanian oyster industry: how can currently underutilised open ocean and deep-water zones be successfully farmed?

The prior oyster aquaculture scoping project highlighted that current deep-water farming is constrained by environmental, genetic, equipment, operational processes, and regulatory uncertainties. These challenges are well recognised yet unaddressed, with limited deepwater trials occurring globally, which creates demand for high-quality research that addresses the needs of openwater oyster aquaculture.

To address the identified gaps in transitioning to open-ocean aquaculture operations in deep-water sites, four work packages have been proposed:

1. Collection of environmental baseline and long-term data.
2. Production yield assessment, testing a variety of genetics, equipment, and aquaculture processes.
3. Collation of environmental and production data and synthesis to develop a forecasting tool for new openocean and deep-water site viability.
4. Exploring legislative and regulatory challenges for oyster aquaculture in open-ocean locations and developing recommendations to address these.

Collectively, these work packages will address challenges in the expansion of deep-water production and diversify the use of Tasmania’s open ocean.

This research addresses a key gap in the transition to open-ocean aquaculture. While some work has been conducted on open-ocean shellfish aquaculture reporting good growth rates in offshore environments, comprehensive scientific reviews and commercial-scale production reports remain limited, with most research focusing on technical feasibility only. This project will undertake novel research on how oyster production can be scaled to temperate open-ocean and deep-water environments by producing a comprehensive, evidence-based guide to the viability of commercial open water aquaculture.