The dilapidated former pulp mill at the Harbor District’s Redwood Marine Terminal II property (left) and a computer-generated simulation of a recirculating aquaculture system facility proposed by Norwegian company Nordic Aquafarms (right). | Imaged via HBMWD.



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Seven years after publicly announcing plans for a huge land-based fish production facility on the Samoa Peninsula, Nordic Aquafarms quietly abandoned the project altogether. 

Last month, Nordic CEO Charles Hostlund submitted paperwork to formally dissolve the company’s California-based affiliate. The move came almost exactly a year after Nordic Aquafarms dropped plans for a similar fish factory in Belfast, Maine.

Reached via email, Humboldt Bay Harbor District Executive Director Chris Mikkelsen confirmed that the company has bailed on Humboldt County. 

“We are aware that Nordic no longer intends to pursue a project on the Samoa Peninsula and are working with Nordic and the County for the orderly wind-down of the project,” Mikkelsen wrote in a reply email.

While the project’s collapse doesn’t come as a total surprise — we reported back in September that prospects looked dim — it nevertheless represents a major setback for local government agencies that stood to benefit from such a major economic development project. 

In 2019, Nordic signed a 30-year lease with the Harbor District, agreeing to pay the agency half a million dollars upon completion of an initial planning period, plus annual rent payments that would eventually exceed $160,000.

The factory itself was projected to cost $650 million and employ up to 150 full-time workers while producing 27,000 metric tons of Yellowtail kingfish per year — enough to supply West Coast markets from Seattle to Los Angeles and beyond.

Operations would have required more than 10 million gallons of seawater per day, plus roughly 2 million gallons per day of fresh water, which the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District (HBMWD) had agreed to provide. That agency has been in need of an industrial-scale customer since the pulp mills shut down, given California’s “use it or lose it” system of allocating water rights. 

The fish factory, known as a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS), was slated to be built on the former site of Evergreen Pulp Mil. That property, a designated brownfield, has undergone extensive EPA-funded assessment and cleanup. Construction would have required Nordic to complete a more extensive, multi-million-dollar cleanup, plus demolition of old infrastructure, including the 270-foot-tall boiler building and adjacent smokestack. 

Nordic reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars in Maine before abandoning the project under the weight of numerous legal battles. There’s no reason to think the company spent less than that here.

While not legally required to complete a full environmental impact report for the local project, Nordic bowed to public pressure and did so anyway. In 2024, the company announced that it had secured the three major coastal development permits necessary to move forward with the project. 

But last April, domestic Nordic executives acknowledged that they were seeking new investors and facing a longer, more expensive timeline amid ongoing regulatory and financial problems. 

The company made no formal announcement of its departure from Humboldt County. The Outpost requested a follow-up call with Mikkelsen, from the Harbor District, in hopes of getting more details. We hoped to ask how much money Nordic owes the agency and what the company’s departure means for its fiscal solvency and development plans. However, he has not yet replied to that request.

We’ve also reached out to the County of Humboldt. We’ll update readers when we have more information.

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CORRECTION: This post initially included a typo misstating the estimated cost of the fish factory project. It was $650 million.

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