Yes. I think the question is regarding the environmental impact comparison, that is, the impacts of net-pen facilities in the ocean compared to recirculating aquaculture systems. It seems that the impacts are more apparent or greater in the net pens, and maybe less in the recirculating systems.
In terms of the specific impacts, there are differences. For example, regarding my earlier comment about the waste from the fish leaving the nets and going to the ocean floor, you don't see that in a recirculating system because that's filtered out. It becomes a very concentrated waste, which must be dealt with. The large volumes of that haven't been explored, so exactly what will happen with that is unknown. However, it won't be dispersed into the environment.
It's important to understand that the release of waste into the ocean from the net pens is not free to the environment right now; it is in fact something that is internalized through the costs that we bear from monitoring and reporting and adhering to regulations. The majority of that is internalized, not externalized. A component may be externalized, but the majority is internalized at this point. Part of the work with the environmental movement in British Columbia is trying to go through each of these components to identify the ones that remain externalized, and then trying to put them into a model for monetization. We're still working through that. It's quite complicated.
I'm going to step away from that to some work that was done for the purpose of the Cohen commission. It's been entered into evidence at the Cohen commission, and it involved an LCA, a life-cycle analysis, approach to a comparison of net-pen and recirculating aquaculture. Again, we were using the information from our pilot proposal, which we have been putting a lot of effort into this year.
It was very interesting to look at that, because, as I was saying a moment ago, there are some localized impacts at a net-pen location that we could discuss. They don't appear to be present at a recirculating hatchery. But there are costs of the capitalization, that is, in terms of the global warming potential of the elements that go into building and running that facility. When an analysis of those costs is done for British Columbia, it turns out that the global warming potential on a life cycle basis of the recirculating aquaculture, if everything goes correctly with the recirculating aquaculture, is similar to but a little worse than the net-pen operations. It doesn't take very much to go wrong in running a recirculating aquaculture facility and thereby make it progressively more costly from a life-cycle analysis perspective, and thus for it have greater global warming potential. That would be the kind of blend of electricity that we would use, if we in British Columbia moved away from hydroelectric and included more purchased power from the United States, for example, or other locations. Then the global warming potential of that energy goes up and the life-cycle analysis changes.
The point I'm trying to make here is that there are the local evaluations, but when you take them all together and you compare them with a life-cycle analysis perspective, net pens are still better—and depending on the particular kind of technology that's used for closed-containment, they can be significantly better.
