Ballast Water Discharge Requires Permit - Even for Fishing Vessels
On December 18, 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed the final version of the Vessel General Permit (VGP). The VGP was set for an effective date of December 19, 2008, but the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California signed an order that pushed the effective date to February 6, 2009.
The VGP regulates discharges incidental to the normal operation of vessels operating in a capacity as a means of transportation. The discharge types that are eligible for coverage under the VGP include: Ballast water; Bilge water; Deck washdown and runoff and above water line hull cleaning; anti-fouling leachate from antifouling hull coatings; aqueous film forming foam (AFFF); boiler/economizer blowdown; cathodic protection; chain locker effluent; firemain systems; freshwater layup; gas turbine wash water; greywater; and many others (the complete list is available under Section 1.2.2 at http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/vessel_vgp_permit.pdf).
Notice of Intent (NOI) is required to be submitted to receive permit coverage. The notice is not required to be submitted for: recreational vessels, vessels that are less that 300 gross tons and less than 79 feet in length, fishing vessels (which fish for finfish, mollusks, crustaceans, and all other forms of marine animal and plant life, except marine mammals and birds), and do not have the capacity to hold or discharge more than 8 cubic meters of ballast water are not required to submit a Notice of Intent. This means that crab vessels that fill their crab tanks with seawater for ballast are required to file a NOI. Those vessels that are required to file a NOI are also required to maintain a ballast water management plan under Section 2.2.3.2 of the VGP permit information (link above). The plans are intended to be a condition to assure compliance under the Clean Water Act , 33 U.S.C. 1251 §402(a)(2).
The NOI can be filled out electronically at http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/vessels/vesselsenoi.cfm. The EPA encourages the use of the eNOI system as processing will be significantly faster than the paper system. The paper version is available at http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/vessel_vgp_noi.pdf.
The EPA estimates that approximately 61,000 domestically flagged commercial vessels and approximately 8,000 foreign flagged vessels may be affected by this permit. States may have more stringent requirements than the EPA and are found in the VGP permit information under Section 6 (link above).
