I'll do my best. You've asked a lot of questions there.
To characterize the ocean floor as being dead is probably inaccurate. I do think there are some localized impacts, but those impacts are probably short-lived, from most of the literature that I've seen. Slice, or emamectin benzoate, which is a compound of choice right now for treating sea lice, has been studied extensively for its impact on non-target organisms and its persistence in the environment.
Now, we can always use more information, but to the best of my knowledge, it's not really having a demonstrable impact on non-target organisms below pens or adjacent to pens. I do believe there's some information that's becoming available on the residue persistence of this compound in the sediments, and of course that will raise additional questions of what the biological relevance is of those residues. I can't really comment further because that's work that hasn't been published yet. Until it gets published, it's hard to know for sure.
I will just touch on pen location. Siting is a tricky thing, and in early days pens were sited in the wrong locations. Now we're getting a lot better at siting pens appropriately. I think we have to look at pen siting more in the context of what we're doing now.
Lastly, as far as the dollars go for closed containment, there are no doubts that closed containment is expensive. Most sites are going to come in at tens of millions of dollars to build. I was looking at some data the other day where the capital cost for one of the sites being developed that I'm aware of—and this is some of the information that I got at a meeting—was pegged at about $23 per kilogram just to build the site. So if you extrapolated that to the west coast, for example, where we grow about 80,000 metric tonnes, and if you were to say we have to move all the sites to closed containment, that means we'd have to come up with $2 billion just to build it.
It's very expensive. Right now the system is profitable, and it's profitable within a well-managed regime. I think there's a place for closed containment. I support closed containment, but I think it has to work alongside other modalities of farming fish.