Researcher Chat: Maha Haji on Sharing Ocean Spaces and Technologies

How might different ocean users share the waters? These researchers evaluated different offshore technologies in search of opportunities for different people to come together, share resources, and maybe even benefit from one another.

Additional Resources:

• "Sheltering effect of various wave energy converter archetypes for offshore wind turbines" (2025) — http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13898
• "Marine spatial planning techniques with a case study on wave-powered offshore aquaculture farms" (2025) — DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2024.121791
• "Design and Optimization of a Wave-Powered Aquaculture Farm with a Case Study on Atlantic Salmon Farm in the Northeast US" (in prep.)
• "The potential for co-located offshore wind energy and integrated multi-trophic aquaculture in the Northeast U.S." (in prep.)

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Transcript

Researcher Chat: Maha Haji on Sharing Ocean Spaces and Technologies

Abbey Greene: The ocean. For many, it's a source of life and peace, but it's also a source of complex issues. Welcome to For Shore, a podcast for talking about those complex ocean issues. 

The ocean is vast, but when it comes to sharing the space, it can take some planning.

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Maha Haji: "You really don't want to upset your neighbors in your neighborhood, right? So why can't we all try to work in a way that benefits? I do think there's win-win solutions out there." 

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Abbey Greene: That was Maha Haji, and in this episode we talk about what it takes for multiple industries to share our ocean spaces.

Poonam Narotam: This podcast comes to you from Sea Grant, a national program that brings top-notch marine science to all coastal US states and territories. This season, we talk with researchers funded by Sea Grant in 2021 about how coastal communities are grappling with new oceanic industries. Fishermen, in particular, are experiencing a lot of changes, and Sea Grant is committed to supporting them. We'll delve into social science, people's perceptions of ocean uses, and how ocean spaces can be shared. We're going to have candid conversations and together we'll make research more accessible and understandable for us all. I'm Poonam Narotam from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant.

Abbey Greene: And I'm Abbey Greene of Rhode Island Sea Grant.

Poonam Narotam: In this episode, we discuss what it will take to make sure ocean users have the resources they need to complete their ocean activities. Then we'll take it a step further and talk about the possibility of ocean users coming together, sharing better, and even possibly benefiting from each other. Let's jump in and meet our researcher.

Maha Haji: My name's Maha Haji. I'm an assistant professor at Cornell University in the mechanical, aerospace, and systems engineering departments. In my group, we look at how we can develop new offshore structures to harvest water, energy, and food. The things we think about are technologies that are coming online — offshore wind, wave energy — and how they can be used to power distributed needs in the ocean. Whether that's recharging underwater vehicles or providing power for offshore aquaculture farms, we also look at how you can utilize seawater for freshwater production, which is really important for certain coastal communities. And then we also look at food — I mentioned aquaculture. We're also very interested in how all these industries and ecosystems are going to work together to grow the ocean economy.

Poonam Narotam: Our oceans may be big, but consider all the activities that happen on the water: shipping, commercial and recreational fishing, aquaculture, ocean energy technologies, military operations, and more. There is a lot of traffic out there today, and sharing the areas that have been earmarked for people to use takes careful planning. The ocean isn't just important to the modern economy — we have to factor in its cultural and recreational importance too.

Maha Haji: We're interested in trying to understand how all this new offshore wind development that's coming online can coexist with other things that are already going on — commercial and recreational fishing, but also future uses of the ocean. There's been some talk of offshore aquaculture, so having fish farms offshore. There's also been talk of not only utilizing wind energy, but wave energy offshore.

Abbey Greene: How would you define coexistence? What does that mean and what does it look like out on the water?

Maha Haji: I think coexistence in some ways could be co-location, where two systems are in exactly the same place — wind turbines would basically be co-locating with aquaculture. And I think coexistence could also be co-designed. There's some idea that you can actually build wave energy converters integrated into offshore wind turbines and maybe reduce the fatigue that an offshore wind turbine sees from the waves, because the wave energy converter is extracting it.

Abbey Greene: We want to acknowledge the term coexistence doesn't resonate with everyone.

Maha Haji: The way I think about coexistence is that the hope is nobody's negatively impacted. I think we can strive towards coexistence. Whether or not that's the reality of today is a different story. But I do think it's something we could strive towards. Unfortunately it hasn't been easy so far. Maybe what we're seeing right now is everyone using the same space without much regard for how they're impacting each other — but I personally see a lot of benefits from trying to strive towards coexistence.

Poonam Narotam: Part of the process of figuring out how different groups can share space is understanding what the existing conflicts are, as well as the ways in which different activities might complement each other.

Maha Haji: Some of the conflicts that have come up more recently have been between offshore wind developers and fishers — the space taken up by an offshore wind farm might either directly impact fishing grounds or indirectly impact a fisher's travel to fishing grounds. They may have to go around the farm, increasing their travel time and fuel costs. So there's a lot of conflict between coastal communities whose livelihoods might be really impacted by offshore wind.

On the flip side, there might be some opportunities for synergy. There's some talk that maybe you could do seaweed farming within an offshore wind farm — that could be an additional revenue source. There's also some talk that wave energy might protect offshore structures; maybe you can incorporate wave energy to protect offshore wind farms and aquaculture farms potentially.

Poonam Narotam: These are new ideas and technologies and there's so much more to research here — in science, answering one research question usually leads to more questions.

Maha Haji: One thing that we're finding in our research is that wave energy converters, because they absorb power from the waves, also reduce the wave height downstream of them. So they make a calmer environment that can be beneficial to offshore wind — those structures are then subject to fewer wave forces and may be able to be redesigned with less material. That might also be beneficial to aquaculture farmers because the wave climate can impact the growth of fish, and potentially the growth of seaweed and shellfish. That's something we're still exploring, but there's potentially a benefit there.

Poonam Narotam: Maha analyzed existing data sets to map out how the waters of the Northeast are currently being used, and her hope is that this data can help with marine spatial planning processes.

Abbey Greene: Let's take a minute to understand what marine spatial planning really is. According to the United Nations International Oceanographic Commission, marine spatial planning is a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives that have been specified through a political process. It's not an end in itself, but a practical way to create and establish a more rational use of marine space and the interactions amongst its uses — to balance demands for development with the need to protect the environment and to deliver social and economic outcomes in an open and planned way.

Maha Haji: So that's the spatial planning part of it. The data-driven part says, okay, maybe we should make those decisions using data about the ocean that we have.

Abbey Greene: What kind of data did you utilize when you were looking into this project?

Maha Haji: For this project we utilized data related to where existing wind farms are, or have been leased and are under development or being permitted. We also looked at data related to wave energy capabilities — wave heights, wave periods — to determine where you might develop a wave energy converter where the wave climate is good. And then we looked at a lot of data related to the physical quantities in the ocean that are important for fish: dissolved oxygen, salinity, temperature — all of that relates to how we model fish growth in our farm. The last thing we incorporated were zones we said you have to stay away from. We used all this data to help us understand what spaces would be good for new industries like aquaculture.

Abbey Greene: What data gaps did you find?

Maha Haji: I think the biggest data gap is understanding fishing grounds, and I think that's primarily because there's a lot of proprietary information. People's livelihoods are on the line.

Poonam Narotam: Maha's team then took the data that they could and put it into a tool they created to make it available for people to use in marine spatial planning processes. Really anyone from any sector or industry who's thinking about how we can better share our oceans can make use of this type of information.

Maha Haji: Our data-driven spatial planning tool — the goal is that it will be publicly available. We have a web browser-based one right now with our existing data that we're still working to debug, but hopefully that will be out there soon. All of our code is completely open source, so anybody is welcome to download and use it. We've got a journal paper that was just published about it and how we've used it. We really strive for everything to be completely open source and usable by others. What we'd really like to do is actually go into the community and use this tool in marine spatial planning efforts. The next step is to see how the community would use this and whether that changes anything about our design — should we tweak anything with the community in mind?

Poonam Narotam: How do you hope your research findings might be able to guide different groups who may not always agree in figuring out a path of working together to find solutions?

Maha Haji: I hope that it will be utilized in marine spatial planning discussions that communities have with industries. I really hope that it could give some rigor to the decisions being made in a way that allows everybody to have a voice. Sometimes in those kinds of conversations, having the facts to back it up may convince some people and help move things forward.

I also hope the tool will be used by the many wave energy developers talking about building wave-powered aquaculture farms. I hope it can help them determine where they would do this and what kind of fish they may be able to grow in these locations — that can help them build the stakeholder relationships they need for specific deployment sites, specific communities, and specific farmers.

Bringing the wave energy resource to aquaculture farmers could be interesting too — helping them understand what the cost difference would be between wave and diesel, and whether that's something they can manage.

I hope it can help start the conversation of, “here are all the possibilities, now let's think about what can and can't coexist, and how that changes things.”

Abbey Greene: The hope is that this tool empowers communities and real people doing the work on the ground to plan for the future of our oceans.

Maha Haji: I want to be careful that we don't use the data in a way that's like parachute science. I really want to be putting the data and these tools out there for grassroots use by the community.

Abbey Greene: Maha wants to work more with communities in the future to figure out how to make data really useful in marine spatial planning processes. We want to thank Maha for her time and sharing her work with us. She and her team published a peer-reviewed paper on this work in the fall of 2024.

Want to learn more? You can find research publications, more resources, and other episodes of For Shore on our website, seagrantenergy.org. We're all learning together, so send us your questions.

Poonam Narotam: This episode was produced by Ryan Campos of the University of Rhode Island Inner Space Center. And this podcast would not be possible without the support of our funders: Rhode Island Sea Grant, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant, the National Sea Grant Energy Liaison Initiative, the Northeast Sea Grant Consortium, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Prince Charitable Trusts, University of Rhode Island, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

See you next time, For Shore!