BARBARA KLEIN: The United States Congress created the Sea Grant program to bring attention and resources to ocean and coastal issues. Todd Hallenbeck is a Sea Grant fellow in Oregon. He uses his laptop computer to show major fishing grounds.

Todd Hallenbeck

TODD HALLENBECK: “There’s a large area of the territorial sea that’s important to fishing with the darker red colors representing some of the most important areas for each of the ports.

Purple lines stretch across the screen of his laptop computer. Little marks representing seabird colonies appear along the coastline.

BOB DOUGHTY: Justin Klure works for Pacific Energy Ventures, a business development company. He feels uneasy with the first set of lines on the ocean planning map.

JUSTIN KLURE: "First blush that those maps look a little intimidating from the industry perspective, only because the areas that they've identified are relatively small and don't align, I think, with some of the basic requirements that the industry is looking at, which is , ou know, access to port, access to transmission, certain water depths."

Todd Hallenbeck admits there are problems.

TODD HALLENBECK: "There are not a ton of areas that seem to not have something of importance in them already. And so the challenge here is finding the few areas that do exist that have the least amount of conflict."

But Justin Klure is not giving up hope yet. He argues for what he calls a "mixed use" approach while more information is gathered.